Rough Night

The Tardis shipped yesterday, and hence the movement in DW on the DIA. Hopefully we'll get some action from my auctions going off today, but so far no bids on 14 lots with 9 hours to go. You know, I love being a lurker, but I hate dealing with them... hypocritical, I know. I'm not confident that the plastics are going to do too well... not too many people are watching them (2 currently). I wanted to list them separately to give people who needed individual plastics a chance to pick them up -- that worked really well with my Black Knight plastics, but isn't playing out with Doctor Who, probably because only certain plastics are prone to breakage. The Great White Hope here is the ramp, which has 14 watchers... a decent showing from it could push the DIA close to 50, even if it has to carry the unsold plastics.

Last night was a march across Eastern Europe to Russia. The goals of my two pronged attack was to 1) pull out my mini-playfield for testing and repairs, and 2) test the new mpf and reassemble it for auction today.

First the good news: Before disassembling, I tested the mpf to try a technique for diagnosing an under-powered motor: running the test with the playfield up, so the motor doesn't have to lift the mpf. But I was foiled when the test ran without problems. I hope that bodes well for when I put it back together.

Things went bad fast after that when I found that, even at this late stage, I'm finding missing parts: This time it's the thing that lowers the Dalek targets as the mpf moves up and down. And there isn't one on the new game either. Luckily, it's nothing more than a metal bar, so I can probably fashion one if necessary. Then when I tried unscrewing the mpf mounting screws from the playfield, the screws just spun in place because the thing they screw into that's supposed to lock into the playfield wasn't locked in. My wife gamely tried to help me as we tried various and sundry techniques to get them out, all to no avail... a task made more difficult by the fact that the more frustrated I am, the more snippy I get. After about an hour, I finally gave up and tried to unscrew the Dalek target assembly for easier access, only to have the same thing happen with those screws and their locking things. ugh.

I did, however, find out why the gray targets are not positioned correctly: None of the screws that hold it to the mpf base were there. Luckily, I had trawled the new cabinet for detritus the night before, so I had a ready supply of magic nuts and screws, and I was able to find two of the four using the screws from the new mpf as a guide.

So I gave up the disassembling fiasco and focused on testing the new mpf. I plugged the wiring harness in and started playing. Just about everything worked, though one of the 5 target optos never lit and one was flakey. Then when I was testing the feature lamps, everything stopped working, because (I think) I blew the lamp fuse on the power driver board. That was the perfect end to a perfect night, so I gave up.

So today I'm reassembling the new mpf, fixing problems I caused in my game, and generally praying that nothing else goes wrong. Yes, that which does not kill me makes me stronger, but I'm plenty strong right now thank you very much.