You have no idea how long I've been waiting to use that title.I've updated the DIA, since the translite has been sold and shipped. The guy who bought it turned out to be the guy who paid $171 for the new one a few days ago, who doesn't own the game but is a big Doctor Who fan. It turns out that the clown who sold it to him did not ship it flat (probably rolled) and it arrived damaged. I packed mine like a small tank, and it ended up being a pound heavier than what I listed in the auction, but luckily my handling charge covered the difference. The net after fees was $69, which is what's reflected in the DIA. I decided to weight average the DIA to make it fairer since I paid $100 more for the playfields. This week's auctions are pretty light, so don't expect much movement... however, in a small-world twist, the current high bidder on the Solenoid Expander is the guy I bought my original Doctor Who and the Black Knight playfield from. Payback time!
And speaking of the playfields, let's look start looking at the reason I now have "Poor Impulse Control" tattooed on my forehead. Our first playfield, Fathom, is the least populated of the games and arguably in the worst shape. There are a bunch of gnarly wear spots and the mylar that surrounded the left pop bumper has lifted, taking some of the paint with it. A Fathom playfield in largely unknown condition went for over $250 a week before I bought the playfields. However, unlike that person, I'm kind of unwilling to put a crappy picture up and say I can't take any more, because Baby Jesus would hate me and Baby Buddha would give me a hot karma injection that I would have me walking bow-legged for a month. I'm not sure what I'll do with the playfield itself... I could try some secret restoration techniques. I'm not sure.
The underside contains more amazing stories. I think it's hard to see in the picture, but the parts are kind of rusty. When I started breaking it down -- originally I was going to sell that stuff first -- the amount of cleaning necessary to bring the parts up to salable quality was pretty high. Also, I think it would increase the sales price marginally if I could demonstrate that the coils work. Imo, the target banks are probably the most auctionable... other than the rust, they're in reasonable condition (well, the most auctionable aside from the Solenoid Expander, which I'm currently selling, duh).While I was taking it apart, I found a fishhook hidden in the wiring... I may have almost impaled my finger on it. That was weird. Then I found a second one. When I found the third one (which had an actual colored bit of lure on it), my wife suggested that the game was originally in a bait and tackle store, which made sense to me (they probably got rid of it when Fish Tales came out).
It doesn't take CSI: Gaithersburg to see what brought this game down was a catastrophic failure of the under playfield fuse. I'm guessing somebody decided the fuse was blowing too much, so they shorted it... and then the magic happened! That entire section of the playfield has scorched, and the wiring around it is crisped. At first I thought that it toasted the Solenoid Expander Board, but now I'm thinking that it probably didn't, or there would have been a path of destruction from the fuse to the board, and I just don't see that. But it looks like this playfield came to a pretty exciting conclusion.In other news, I've been playing DW pretty consistently, and everything seems to be running fine. That's lured me into a false sense of security, so I'm thinking about taking a crack at fixing the mini-playfield...
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