I like the cut of that doctor's trim

A bunch has been going on, but it's mostly newsy stuff that's not terribly interesting. For example, yesterday I found out that the Funhouse machine in a local gas station was gone... not sure if it's gone permanently or not. Came in third in VA league after an awesome semi-finals and terrible finals. Just to shake things up, in MD I managed to choke in the semi-finals for an anemic 5th place finish.

Last night I finally got around to replacing the translite glass in Doctor Who. For pretty much as long as DW has been set up, I've been using a piece of poorly cut lexan for the translite glass, with various sizes of Williams translite trim to hold it on and (what I now know to be) a Stern lift trim at the bottom. While lighter than a real glass and perfectly adequate when I didn't have one, this wouldn't do... especially since the Stern trim had a habit of falling off without a lot of provocation. Well, I got some real glass at Allentown this year, and I bought some real Williams lift trim from Marco a few weeks ago, so all the ducks were in a row.

I was able to reuse the side trim that was on the lexan because that was about the right length. The top trim on the lexan was actually two small pieces that I'd cut off the sides to make them fit, so I discarded those and cut a new piece using our Dremel. I also Dremelled the lift trim and those both fit pretty nicely. Then to make everything super-nice, I cut notches in the back of the top piece so the side trim would nestle snugly. As you can see from the picture, it's a pretty good fit... the other side, not so much, but it's good enough for something nobody ever sees. I'll do the same thing with the T2 translite glass, which only has two trims holding it on (and no lift trim, which made it a bitch to remove the first time). Unfortunately, I only ordered one lift trim from Marco, because I wasn't sure it was the right one. So I ordered another one from them this morning, and felt stupid because I had to pay for shipping again (I did manage to find one other part I needed, but that was of little consolation).

Marco actually did well by me with the previous order. I also got one of the plastics that gets shot up by the cannon on T2 and replacement decals for the drop target. I was going to make my own decals for the target, but Marco had them for $2 a piece, so after the Who-mobile incident I figured that was cheaper than doing it myself. When I got them, the decals sucked... it was blurry and the part number lettering was a sucky computer font, not the basic sans-serif of the original. I was literally able to print a better one using the image that accompanied the description on Marco's website. So I called up Marco and a very nice pinball parts lady helped me. After I described the problem, she went to the folder where they kept the decals and saw that there were two batches, one normal and one that sucked ass. She said she could see why I was unhappy with them. So she told me to keep the crappy ones and she sent me two of the good ones for free. Yay for Marco!