Coin Door Love

The next major zone of repairs was the coin door. The first step was to un-crimp the crappy job I did on the test button wires and use the crimping tool to make a set of nice, honest crimps. Also, I put them in the correct plug slots, so now the buttons won't be reversed. Testing had revealed that one of the coin slots had all of its parts, so I wired that up to the coin switch pins. Finally I had created a makeshift lamp circuit using old light sockets, wired it to the GI pins on the coin door board, and stuck them to the coin mechs using sticky foam that I picked up at Target. I tested and everything worked so well, I turned free play off and set it to 1 credit per quarter and 3 credits for two.

My coin door lamp circuit went through several iterations... I had to recall what little I remembered of my Electrical Engineering class in college. First I tried out the lamps in series, and that gave me one anemic light and one barely lit one. I went through three revisions.

    /-- + Lamp - --\
V --                -- Gnd
    \-- + Lamp - --/

This is the classic parallel circuit, but had too many wires that would clutter up the already cluttered coin door.

Then there was an interim design which I've forgotten. I took that, removed some useless connections, and wound up with this:

V -- + --- +
    Lamp  Lamp
      - --- - --- Gnd

I liked this one because it was nice and spare... no Y intersections and a minimum of work for my meager soldering skillz. You can play follow the wires on the picture above to see how it played out in the real world.

When I switched off free play, I also made what (to me) is a change I never thought I would make: I reset the game to 3 balls per game.

Gasp.

Now, you have to understand that 5 balls per game has been Holy Writ since I first started playing 30 years ago. But the more I've played DW over the past few weeks, the more I've realized that it's designed to be a three ball game. With five balls, I end up getting too many features on a regular basis. And I have to say that since I made the switch my games are just a smidge more satisfying in a somewhat hard to quantify way.

Also, I have added a new item onto my list of things to do by summer's end: I'm going to swap the game into the other cabinet. I've been planning to restore the red areas of the cabinet sides using some kind of decal something-or-other that I was going to make myself using the other cabinet. I felt a kinship to the old cab because I still believe that it was originally a prototype with the moving Dalek head. But a few weeks ago wife said something that infected my mind with the idea of using the new cabinet, and the infection spread, reproduced, and eventually overpowered my loyalty to the old one. I mean, the new cab has all of its red in unfaded glory, fer cheese sakes. It has more flaws in it than the old one, but I now think those will be easier to repair than the Rube Goldberg decal thing I had planned.

And finally, here's what happened when Rosie discovered that I had connected the Dalek head:

Backbox Love

Like I said, I've been actually getting a lot done on Doctor Who. First up, I decided to work on problems with the backbox, all lighting related: There was a bunch of GI out on the backbox light board, the Dalek GI was out, and only two of the Doctor lights worked.

First I decided to do something totally unrelated to lighting and reconnected the Wobble-head. That was pretty easy, but then I decided to ready the dome to be screwed back on. I noticed that if the dome was lined up with the screw holes, the eye stalk would bump into the inside of the dome when it moved. That didn't seem so cool, so I tried adjusting the mounting nuts to make the Dalek lean back, hoping this would reposition the eye as well. It didn't really. So I repositioned the dome so it's hanging over the top of the game slightly and left it at that. I emailed the guy who made it and he said he had never heard of this problem. In a world of mass conformity, I suppose it's comforting to be unique.

Next I moved on to the various GIs that were out. I checked voltages at the points where they exited the power board and didn't get much. Then I jumped a working strand of lights with a non-working one and that lit them... but then the stress of all those lights running on one circuit blew out the working strand. I think I lamented for a while, then looked up GI problems in the pinball repair guides. Mostly they focus on complicated stuff like replacing burned connectors and stressed circuits. That didn't sound so cool, but buried in the tough solutions was a relatively easy one: Replace the fuses. I did that, and now all my GI works fine. This imparted a valuable lesson to me which I knew but had forgotten: Check the simple stuff first. *sheesh*

Finally I pulled the light board for the 7 doctor lamps on the display mount. Six of them work when the display is face down, but when it's mounted in the game, only two work. I connected the board up to my power supply and found a legitimately bad twist-out light socket, which I replaced. But the Doctor 7 lamp worked when I tested it, so I surmised that it was a bad transistor on the power board or something. I put the board back in and was rewarded with six working Doctors, which I chalked up to yet another bad connection. Sylvester McCoy would have to wait for a future repair session.

And those were the backbox repairs. Mostly successful, can't complain.

From Allentown to Our Town

Fortunately/unfortunately a lot is going on and I'm not writing any of it down.

Went to Pinball Wizards in Allentown two weeks ago. The night before I checked rgp to see if there were any up-to-the-minute reports, but all I found what this noob report. I was surprised that he did not point out that when he was walking around the Flea Market in the rain, he got wet.

Drive up was uneventful, except for seeing a truck shedding a retread and an Amish guy driving a buggy.

Spent yet another all-time low amount of money, $50 including admission and a pita sandwich at the Middle Eastern place in the farmer's market. There just wasn't much on my list... my games are working too well these days, or I already have the parts I need to fix them. There wasn't anything in the flea market that really jumped out at me, even though I brought a fat wad of cash with me after last year's Doctor Who incident.

There were some pretty good machines there, and several that were comically malfunctioning... such as the Funhouse that didn't have use of its left flippers, or the Mystic with no feature lights. But after so many years -- I think this might be my 10th year going to the show -- since I assume there will be a whole bunch of crappy games, I'm not as annoyed as I used to be. As with bad movies, the key is low expectations.

I did finally get to play the new Indiana Jones game, which I found reasonably fun. Unfortunately the sound was turned down too low for me to hear what is reportedly the worst Sean Connery impersonation that anyone has ever been paid to do. They had a CSI there, but it had a crowd and I didn't have a chance to play. And I did get to play the aforementioned Mystic, which I was looking forward to because I hadn't played it since my college days and I had co-done an adaptation of it in my VP salad days. I was kind of cheesed that it didn't work, because its tic-tac-toe conceit relies pretty heavily on feature lights. But I amused myself by sending a text message to my wife with a picture of the game and the text "Why are they hurting the Mystic?" which is hysterically if you've see The Fall.

I toyed with the idea of buying LEDs for Paragon to reduce its power needs, and even went to the point of trying to estimate the number of bulbs on one that was there, but when I showed up with cash in hand to the people hawking them said they were out of the #44/47 bulbs. Later I was sort of glad, because fixing Paragon's power problem by reducing the power consumption of the machine isn't really fixing it, it's just putting the problem off by a few years. Maybe that's cool for the National Debt, but this is pinball, which is serious. But that got me thinking about LEDs, and I think I'm going to buy some and install them on Quicksilver. Partly for fun, partly on the off chance that in a few years incandescents will be impossible to find, but mostly because QS is the most visually striking of all my machines and LED bulbs will probably make it more so. Their other-worldly glow is well-suited to the game and its theme of big-headed naked women in a dimension of liquid mercury.

On the way home, I finally stopped at Pakha's Thai House Restaurant, which is located outside of Harrisburg. I've been passing this place every year since it opened and have always been curious about it -- I wouldn't expect Dillsburg PA to be the center of a huge Thai community -- but the food was pretty good and pretty cheap. It appears to be where all the cool kids in the Harrisburg area hang out, and based on the photos behind the cash register, the Fox 43 news team from York is quite enamored with it.