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.