Miscellaneous Love

I'm going to take a moment and mention some progress I've made on my work area. Longtime or diligent (or both!) readers will recall this post from about a year ago detailing the disaster area that was our basement. On the right is the current state of my work area... there are a bunch of boxes out because my daughter is making cleaning up her summer project. But you can see that I have a desk and some space to work. I can walk around without juking or turning sideways too much. I've even put up some posters (one is even framed) and placed the pachinko in what I think is a reasonable place. As soon as I get closer to being done, I'll have to take a picture from the same angle for some before/after action.

Forensic analysis of this picture will indicate that I'm using a different camera. That's because my beloved first digital camera, the Canon PowerShot S30 that I bought 7 years ago for almost $600, has done broke. It was actually pretty handy because its interminable shutter time and 5-10 second lag to write pictures to the memory card made it so no one cared if I just kept it downstairs with my stuff. Now I have to use my wife's camera, which is a lot better but in slightly higher demand. *sigh*

OK, so repairs on DW continue: I forgot to mention that I installed the new playfield glass switch. I cut the old switch off and soldered on the new one, then spent about ten minutes adjusting it so the switch actually closed when the glass was in its normal position. Now it works great! One small step for me, one giant leap toward total pinball legitimacy!

I also had some excellent troubleshooting action. At some point -- I think it was right after I added all the stuff to the coin door -- I looked at the playfield and said, dagnabbit I'm tired of the right side extra ball lanes being lit all the time! That and some of the Time Expander lights just never seemed to go out. So I did a little lamp testing and found out that no matter what light was lit, the lights on the same row in columns 2 (where the right lights are) and 5 (where the lower row of Time Expander lights are) would also light. Clearly we had a short. I even used the Pinball Repair Guide's troubleshooting technique of pulling the light plugs from the power board and checking them for continuity and got connections where there shouldn'ta oughta been none. So, bad diodes is a possible culprit and easiest to check, so I checked diodes in column 2 until I came to the Doctor 7 lamp, which for lo these three years has been hanging impotently under the playfield without a bulb in it. And the odd thing is I've been looking at that light the whole time and just mentally bleeping over it because I'm usually under the playfield trying to fix something else. It turns out that socket was hanging against another wire and was causing the short! Hey! Cause and effect! So I mounted it to the playfield and put a bulb in, and two magical things happened: The column 2 lamps no longer lit with the other bulbs and the previously non-working Doctor 7 backbox lamp lit like the real McCoy... the real Sylvester McCoy, that is! hyuk hyuk. So all this time I was thinking it was bad traces or a problem with the transistor, and it was really just two stupid lamps in series.

Fresh from that triumph, I did the same thing for column 5 but ran into a problem: Just like the Doctor 7 lamp, there is a bulb that's out in column 5, the right lock on the Mini-playfield. The problem is that I can't get to that light without disassembling the MPF, and disassembling the MPF is a big chore that requires me to have easy access to both sides of the playfield -- I need to unscrew screws and while doing so keep the things the screws are screwed into from turning... not easy to do by yourself while the playfield is in the game. I think I'll just wait until the great cabinet swap and deal with it then.

And speaking of which, I had some goof off time last week, so I decided to clean the underside of the new cabinet, which had some scuffs and 17 years of dirty finger grabs in its Convenient Lifting Areas. First I used various household cleaners like Simple Green and 409 without much luck. Then I mixed some Pine-sol and water and that did a lot better. I finished off by scrubbing the really filthy parts with one of those Mr. Clean micro-pore sponges, which really got the job done. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures since the camera was broken, but I figure I can take some detailed shots when I clean out the inside.

Finally, I'm going to attempt a rare social thing: On Monday I am going to go to League Night at the Virginia branch of the Free State Pinball Association. Hopefully I can actually talk to people who actually share my interests; worst case: I'll end up standing quietly off to the side like I imagine high school dances would have been if I ever went to one, which I didn't. Boy, 46 years old and still an awkward teen. Nice.

Awkward Teen Hunger Force. Number 1 in the 'hood, G.