She's got legs, you idiot!

Let's remind ourselves that we've got other pinball games to deal with, in this case Doctor Who. I have been slouching slowly towards Bethlehem with that one.

Our boiler has been having a lot of problems for the past year, which is tough because DW, when down, blocked access to it. When service guys have come in the past, I've folded the game up and lifted it upright... making sure to keep it on boards in case of a flood. I decided I was tired of that, so with the help of my wife I finally attached the rusty legs I got back in May. I was going to try to remove the rust from them, but it's probably less trouble to buy a $20 pair of legs in two months than it is to de-rust these legs. Then I put my el cheapo pinball skates (tiny wheels I got at Home Depot for $9 each, thanks to a recommendation from This Old Pinball) and rolled it into a corner. Yay!

So this weekend it was time to do some actual stuff. I'd just gotten a new lock that clamps together the cabinet and the head (plus some #906 lamps) from Bay Area Pinball earlier in the week. I was disturbed to find water in the channel between the playfield glass and the hole into the cabinet! I think the dumbass service guy must have let some water slip when he drained the boiler. It looks like none got on the playfield or in the cabinet, so I dried it off and continued. I screwed on the new lock, then replaced the one or two lamps (I think the Escape flasher is still burned out, but I have to look at it more carefully). When I lifted up the head, I noticed that the DMD panel had come loose from the head.

Tonight I powered it up for the first time, and I seem to have lost a few more vertical DMD lines on the right side, probably when the panel came loose. But on the plus side, after a quick look at Black Knight's door switch, I found the two connectors for the coin door switch, closed them with a wire, and removed another obstacle in fixing the game... when I turned it on, the mini-playfield started cycling and for the first time the game didn't yell at me to keep my damn hands away from the mini-playfield. That was nice.

I was going to try to connect the service buttons that I got on the French coin door, but found that the Molex pins I had were the wrong size. So I got out the old alligator clips and attached it the old-fashioned way (I put paper between the clips to keep them from shorting). Here's an interesting fact: The game won't let you press the buttons if the coin door is closed. I had to remove my short before it would let me test the game.

The test was somewhat enlightening. The mini-playfield goes up OK, but when it goes down it registers an error. My hope is that the opto switch for the mini-pf is bad, since I have a replacement.

My goal this weekend was to get the flippers on, but I wimped. As you've probably guessed if you've read a few of my posts, whenever I get close to doing something for the first time, the Big Fear grips me and I put it off as long as possible. I have always had a huge fear of failure, and it has kept me from doing a lot of things -- like dating regularly in high school and college. Usually either circumstances intervene (for example, my wife asked me out on our first date) or I get over it. Hopefully I'll get around to it soon.

Continuing the World Tour, last week I stopped at a pool place in Rockville which supposedly had a Pirates of the Caribbean, albeit in poor repair. Unfortunately, when I finally found it, it was turned off. The place it's at is under new management, but a few years ago it had four pinball games, and I would go there every few weeks to get my pinfix. At various times, they had (sorry, no links: it's late. look 'em up yourself) Scared Stiff, Medieval Madness, Monster Bash, Whitewater, Attack from Mars, Monopoly, Roller Coaster Tycoon and possibly one or two others. It was also the Montgomery County home of the Free State Pinball Assoc, so the games were usually in reasonably good repair. At some point, though, they moved the games out and I was sad.