Making Up for Lost Time Streams

There's been a lot of rebuilding since the last post, but I would be remiss if I didn't ramble incoherently about pinball league. I've been playing in a league that's loosely affiliated to the main league, the Terrapin Pinball League. Basically, it occurs at Town Hall, a bar near the University of Maryland when the Terps play a home game. I really haven't enjoyed it... I don't like the fact that it's almost always on a Saturday, which puts a big dent in my day; it's never at a fixed time because the games are at different times; and it seems like most of the people are pre- and post-playing their rounds, so the number of people who actually show up has dwindled... yesterday it was just me. I had already decided not to do it again, but this was the final straw. Plus the fact that it was apparently Drunken Idiot Night at Town Hall really didn't make playing with myself any more fun. And because of the smallish field of players, I might end up in the as yet unscheduled playoffs. However, I might not even be here for the finals because...

In a little over a week I'm returning to the Old Country for my Dad's 90th birthday. While I'm out there, I plan to stop in at the Pacific Pinball Museum, the Musée Mechanique, and Pins and Needles. I wanted to go to Playland Not at the Beach, but they're only open on weekends and I'll only be in the Bay Area from Tuesday to Friday. Anyway, I'm really looking forward to the PPM... they really seem to have their act together, which is a refreshing change from other museums I might have been involved with in the past. Oh, and in the interstice between my wife leaving on Saturday on me leaving on Tuesday, I'm going to head up to Hanover PA and check out the Timeline Arcade, which just opened this week (and they apparently have a Transformers, so I might see fit to take a couple of nut shots at Optimus Prime).

But the point of this blog is repairs, so let us talk about Doctor Who's cabinet swap, which is continuing apace. I ended up sending the CPU board to Rob Anthony, well-known and well-regarded repairer of boards. He did a great job, but sadly for me it was at a great price... but I also decided to have him fix the other CPU board I had, which did add significantly to the cost. But on the plus side, I now have what appears to be a 100% working board.

Everything that's going to be cleaned beforehand has been cleaned, and I've been slowly reassembling the playfield and testing it as I go. Jeez, I thought I'd written about a lot of this, but looking back at my last post I see that I've written next to nothing about this.

So let's discuss one particular event, the removal of the mini-playfield. I've never taken the mini-playfield out of my game because I could never get the screws out... the t-nuts that they were screwed into turned impotently rather than t-nutting in the t-nutty way they're supposed to. The Onlines indicated that somebody -- I'm guessing Williams -- might have glued the screws in. I tried holding the t-nuts with pliers, heating to break the glue, freezing to shrink the part, just all manner of things. Finally, I pretty much got fed up and cut the screw heads off with my wife's Dremel. This did the trick. I did go through 3 or 4 cutting tools (they sell them in 20-packs, so no surprise there), there were a lot more sparks than I expected, and after one broke and embedded in my ceiling I decided to wear eye protection, but man, it's so much easier to remove the screws without their heads. When I finally pulled a t-nut off the remainder of the screw, I could see residue of what was probably the glue in the threads. And two of the nut holes had a trough dug in them by the teeth of the nuts.

Luckily, I can just jump right to the end of the story. ^_^ I bought some replacement nuts at the hardware store -- for a change, it's a pretty common size, not some crazy obscure part that I have to get from Marco or something. Acting on the advice of the guy who wrote the book on the Mini-playfield, I filled the troughs with a mixture of carpenter's glue and sawdust (which he says is stronger than regular wood filler) and set the new t-nuts in place, being extremely careful not to get any glue into the business part of the nut. When the glue dried, I had a nice solidly placed set of t-nuts, ready to bear the weight of the freshly cleaned mini-playfield.

Well, that's it for tonight. There's more excitement to come, and a lot more shenanigans with the mini-playfield. So stay tuned.

Another Awesome Innovation from Stern, the only maker of REAL pinball games on the planet!!*

* Depending, of course, on your definition of the words "only", "REAL", and "planet." For example, if you consider Chicago to be on a completely different planet from New Jersey and Spain, the above statement is true.

But let's dial down the snark to report on this awesome Transformers playfield shot that I saw on Pinball News this morning. The caption in the main article reads: "This appears to be a moving ramp which, when down, allows the ball between the model's legs, or deflects the ball upwards to strike Optimus Prime when raised." Look carefully at the angle and trajectory of this ramp, compared with this shot of the Megatron toy which shows the ramp down. I believe -- and this is purely conjecture -- that Stern may have created pinball's first nut shot.

This is big, pals 'n' gals. Really big. The only thing we can hope for is that the sound effect is a bell ringing followed by the Optimus Prime toy doubling over in pain.

Firings and Wirings

Wow, it turns out it has been a month since my last confession.

The big news in our household is that my daughter, Zoe Entropy, was laid off from her job at the National Pinball Museum in anticipation of their move to Baltimore. Thank goodness, because having to word my blog posts in such as way as to not reveal my complete lack of confidence in David Silverman was giving me a nervous tic in my hand (I believe the medical term is Crazy Flipper Finger). Now I can let fly highly opinionated screeds like this: His business model of complaining, ignoring sound advice, and waiting around for people to give him enough money and publicity and stuff to keep the museum alive just doesn't seem sustainable to me. And even from a human resource standpoint, why lay somebody off when you've got a week of hard packing to do? Lay her off afterwards, dumbass (though to be fair, that may not have been David's decision entirely; the museum's somewhat twitchy business manager is also culpable in that one). Still on staff is Zoe's classmate Kyle, whom I find to be something of a cold fish and a kiss ass.

Either way, Zoe had started thinking about leaving the museum -- I guess living in a constant vortex of chaos and uncertainty at a salary roughly equivalent to minimum wage for a year was not so enjoyable as you might think. And after one particularly petarded incident -- in which Zoe's boss threatened to fire everyone because money disappeared from a donation box on the museum's last day of business -- even I suggested that even if she didn't lose her job she should start looking for a new position, and I'm the one with the most to gain from her continued employment (it sure wasn't her... not at minimum wage, anyway! *rim shot*).

So that leaves me with a decision about my future with the museum. My daughter was never that invested in the pinball life, she was in it for the museum experience -- which as the days wore on became less like museum work and more like wage slave retail work -- so I don't anticipate she'll look back much after she finds a new job. My wife is Done with the museum... when they finally announced the location of the new museum, I conversationally said "Hey, you know where the museum's new location is?" and she flat out said "They fired my daughter. I do not care." I'm certainly not going to be there every week fixing games now that it's not just across the river from my work. There's a big difference between a usually pleasant 20 minute walk (be fair, that's each way) and a 1 hour car ride plus paying for parking to a place where my daughter isn't working.

So I don't know. I don't have quite the same scorched earth attitude that Mrs. Entropy has. My current plans are to see if I can make it up to the museum every month or two to fix games, and if that doesn't work out for them or me, then whatever. And on the plus side, I won't have to put up with Silverman's nails-on-chalkboard effect on me.

And one more thing of interest to the patres familias out there is this: In the last month at the museum's operation, my daughter's boss switched Zoe's and Kyle's jobs (and looking back on it now, that was probably in anticipation of laying her off), which meant that Zoe was not there on Tuesday when I was there fixing games. I think I was there for two Tuesdays without her. And I will be honest, it wasn't as much fun fixing games when she wasn't there. Mostly she would be working in the library -- her actual "office", part of the hallway to the back door, was sans air conditioning and located under a skylight, not so awesome during the second hottest summer on record -- but I could call out to her for help or comment on something colossally silly about a game fix or tell her to call her Mom and say we were going to be late, and that added significantly to the fun. The coldness and the fishiness and the I-wasn't-somebody-whose-ass-he-had-to-kissiness of Kyle actively discouraged that kind of delightful banter. Fixing games is still fun, but fixing them with my daughter was more fun; fixing them with Kyle around was actually less fun.

SO. Enough of that whiny self-involved bullshit. Let's talk pinball. Last time, the score was 3 games playable to 3 games down.

It was time to tackle Paragon. Paragon, you may recall, has been randomly resetting on the first game when it starts at all. I wanted to figure out what was wrong with it well in advance of the York Show so that I could try to figure out if I needed to buy a replacement MPU board there. So I turned it on for the first time in a while, it played then randomly reset, then wouldn't start up. Checking the MPU flashes -- and damned if it doesn't hurt not to be able to link to the pinrepair.com section on that, I will tell you -- it conked out after the third flash, which meant that it was failing while testing chips that are in sockets (!!!). And referring to my printed copy of the pinrepair.com page on the subject :D I learned that reseating those chips sometimes fixes problems with the chips. So I pulled the board, reseated pretty much everything that was in a socket just to be sure, put it back in, and day-yam if that game didn't boot like a charm and play like a champ. I have been playing it since and the game has just been a li'l angel. And even better, now that I'm a better player and can actually bounce pass, my average scores are a lot higher. The only other Paragon I've been playing lately has been one that a league-pal in Baltimore owns, and his is a brutal drain monster. Mine, in contrast, is much friendlier and funner to play, in my opinion. Maybe not so good for gauntlet-style training, but I actually enjoy myself... and that's good in pinball sometimes.

Moving on, Game 5 is Doctor Who, which needs a cabinet swap. I moved the games into working positions (new cab on legs, old cab on the floor next to it), pulled the stuff out of the old cab, folded it up, and have been using it as a table and staging area since. The wiring harness went into the dishwasher, and I installed it, the transformer, and various cabinet-y things. I put the boards that I had in -- you may recall (assuming I wrote about it) that I used the CPU and display boards in T2, then pulled a CPU and the "tested and working" display board out of storage... and in case you're not keeping track like I am, we've just celebrated 5 years of being bitter about that transaction, which I'm pretty sure is a new record.

Plugged everything in, booted up, and it locks up immediately. I don't think I expected that, but it's not new. Unplugging the multi-stop ribbon cable from the display driver board allows the game to boot, which my sources tell me is probably an issue on the CPU board with one of the chips controlling the interaction with the driver board. I'm worried that it's because one of the pins in the plug on the CPU board for this cable has broken off, but I've been told that shouldn't be a problem. Anyway, I decided to leave that debugging debacle for another day and went with my other CPU board. That one booted fine, so I hooked up the DMD for some real display board action. It worked well, although there is still a hint of the emergency light flash on the DMD, so I'm not getting out of fixing the display driver board any time soon.

I knew this CPU was three columns shy of a working switch matrix -- which, I know, sounds like a description of David Silverman (BOOM! totally pwned his ass) -- but testing confirmed this. Since my goal is to fix all of the issues I can find during the cabinet swap, I need to fix this and the display board high voltage issues in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I've started disassembling the playfield for a good cleaning and debugging. Nothing exciting to report there.

In league news, I failed pretty epically in the finals as usual, taking 4th place of 4 contestants. Fall season starts tomorrow, and I'm hoping my poor Week 0 performance won't be an indicator of future results. We lost Monster Bash, The Addams Family, and Congo, and in their places got The Shadow and Volcano... so I have to level up my Phurba and not trapping on the right flipper skills, respectively. I've also started playing in a somewhat informal league at Town Hall near the alma mater. It's a little rough on me because instead of being at a fixed time, it's either before or after UMCP Terrapin Home Games... which means clowns like me who don't give a hoot for sports spend a lot of time waiting for fellow players who do. But it's an experiment and we'll see how it goes. Games there are Attack from Mars, Twilight Zone, World Poker Tour, Mousin' Around, Strikes and Spares, BS Dracula, and Demolition Man -- several of these used to be at John's Place, so it's nice to return to a couple of old pals.

Silver Lining

Even a craptacular suckfest like my PAPA experience was has to have something positive come out of it, right? Well, it doesn't really have to, but in this case it did. It got me off my duff to do some much needed repairs.

While I was driving back and my wife was kind of dozing, I made a mental list of the things I need to fix on T2. I picked T2 because the other games either have something really big wrong with them or need a lot of work, whereas T2 made for a very concise list:

• Fix the lamp column problem
• The kickback aim seems to be off, sometimes allowing balls to drain while its impotently kicking at them
• Bottom jet bumper doesn't work
• Ameliorate the ridge on the playfield in the left orbit, which seems to be interfering with balls
• Adjust flippers
• Fix Hunter/Killer Jackpot lamps
• Start button light is out (I wasn't sure about this during my drive, but it turns out to have been true)
• Fix flaw around edge of autofire hot dog insert
• Fix flaw on front of cabinet
• Try to do something about lines that are out on DMD

And I added this after I fixed the start button lamp:

• Clean start button

So on Monday night after PAPA I got started. Most obvious was fixing the jackpot lamp board, which really impacts gameplay. I've managed to get it working in the past by reseating the plug, but that didn't work this time so I pulled the whole board. Testing with my handy PC power supply -- that thing is so danged useful! -- showed that there was a bad connection between the last lamp in the circuit and the ground pin. Yes, it's fixable, but is it worth fixing when you've got a spare set of lamp boards in a box? Not really. I pulled the necessary board out, transferred the sockets, tested it, and plugged it in. Done!

Next up was the start button. Did the obvious stuff like checking the bulb and where the wires were going to the coin door interface board. Everything looked fine, but it was getting late so I left it disconnected (and played a few games, so I had to open the coin door to press the start button :P ).

Tuesday night I skipped volunteering at the museum because I was sort of fed up with pinball, but I continued to work on the T2 start button. Since the cabinet area seemed OK, I took a look in the backbox to see if anything was up there, and there was something in the Up position: Following the interboard wiring table (not as nice as the diagrams in the Doctor Who and later manuals, but in this case serviceable), there is supposed to be a 3 pin socket in J136 with one cabinet lamp wire going into it and another in J135. On my game there was no socket at J135 and two wires attached to J136, one of them somewhat haphazardly as though it had been stuck there because there was no place else to put it. That, of course, turned out to be the wire that was supposed to be in J135. Not having any .1" sockets (pins? yes. hole plugs? yes. sockets? no. sheesh) I just alligator clipped the wire to the proper pin, yielding a working start button! It was at this point that I added the last item to my list, because the button plastic was a sickly yellow.

Next I decided to look at the dead bumper. My first guess proved incorrect since the switch test showed that the switch was working fine. But the solenoid test showed that it didn't work, and in fact just clicked demurely instead of a full-bodied whack. I'm not really a pop bumper expert, but comparing it to the working bumpers showed that the metal and bakelite pieces that connect the plunger to the bumper ring was not doing any connecting. The two pieces are supposed to come together around the neck of the plunger like a pillory; however, both pieces were facing the same direction, allowing the plunger to get out of the stocks and wander around rather than being pelted with rotten vegetables like it should. So I disassembled it, reassembled it correctly, and it worked perfectly. Now the action in El Bumperino borders on insane... my bonus multiplication has at least doubled since I fixed the bumper.

Finally on Wednesday night I tackled the jaundiced start button. When I disassembled the button to try to clean it, the plastic with the text on it crumbled. I tried to use a spare button from one of the Doctor Who cabs, but there was some reason I didn't, like maybe it didn't fit or something. So I printed out the word START 3/4" wide on paper, cut a circular piece and put that in where the plastic was. It looked fine and I like the white better than yellow because it suits the game better... though I do notice the grain of the paper, so I may need to replace it with something a little more uniform than 20 lb printer paper. The only problem I ran into was when I put it back together the button would go in but not pop out. After some trouble shooting I found that in prying up the outer plastic I had deformed it, and that was rubbing against the sides of the button housing. I filed off the rough edges and now it works.

And that's what I've done so far with T2. During idle time watching TV, I've been slowly clearing stuff away from and off of the Doctor Whos in preparation for preparing to do the cabinet swap, and last night I put the new cabinet up on legs and repositioned the old one where I can hopefully get to the parts easily.

I was planning to do a lot more pin-related stuff this weekend, but I found out a few weeks ago that stalwart personal finance manager Quicken, which I've been using for 15 years but has pretty much abandoned the Mac, will not run under the new version of the Mac OS. After years of neglect -- and lagging about 3 years behind the PC feature set, which I guess makes the current version on par with Quicken 2004 for PC -- this was the last straw, so I downloaded iBank, a Mac-only product. Basically I got sucked in for two days and actually enjoyed paying my bills in software that functions... the joy of being able to cut, copy, and paste text reliably made me lose track of time. Sorry, Quicken, I'm just not Intuit any more.

And how could I have forgotten this? Before I left for PAPA, somebody pointed out that a picture of my daughter and I graced a pinball article in The USA Today! At first they said I was on the cover, but it turns out I was on page three. I am pointing at a nondescript part of the playfield in Creature (maybe the Snackbar?). The guy took the picture on a day when I'd gone to pick up my daughter from work, but I'd pretty much forgotten about it until the article appeared. The article was sitting out on the desk at PAPA, though I don't think anybody recognized me. :( The most unfortunate outcome? An inmate serving 18 years for dealing crack sent my daughter a letter saying he'd really like to get to know her... and he should be eligible for parole by 2014! What a catch. Does this happen every time you appear in the newspaper? If so, ew!

Epic and Most Egregious PAPA Fail. Ever.

There are some weekends when tournaments go well for you, and there are some weekends when they don't; this last weekend at PAPA was of the latter sort.

You know, even though I said that all I was hoping for was to break into the top tercile of C, I was kind of expecting to do a lot better. And maybe that was my problem... I looked at how much better I've been playing in the last year and projected that forward, showing a much better showing.

Anyway, the trip up was OK. We left a little late, but it wasn't like I was on much of a deadline. When we got there, though, I was a little drained. Played a few games to warm up -- which is usually sort of pointless, as my play is usually randomly good or bad based on factors I am unable to fathom.

So, our C Bank consisted of Addams Family, CSI, Iron Man, Terminator 2, The Simpsons Pinball Party, The Rolling Stones, Twilight Zone, Wheel of Fortune, and World Cup Soccer. Kind of a mixed bag for me... Addams and TZ are games I have done well on, but generally others do better. T2 I own, which as I've pointed out in the past is a mixed bag. Stones has been very good to me in league, and I've played World Cup in league and sorta know what to do, but our is so crappy that I rarely deal with it. IM is always pretty brutal, WoF I've played and gotten the GC on the game at Volleyball House, but I couldn't tell you how or why... I just looked up at the end of the game and had 105 Mill. And CSI I'm just not that familiar with.

So for my first round I went with IM, T2, Stones, WoF, and World Cup; I did poorly, encouraging (my score was basically the total of three skill shots and one 3x Jackpot), poorly, poorly, and pretty good for me, respectively. So I put in a second entry, swapping out Soccer with CSI on the theory that if I didn't know it, most other people probably don't either. I managed a respectable IM score, but just about everything else was junk.

I also put in a Classics II entry which was not great, which landed me at 114 out of 128. Considering classics is all skill levels, I usually don't expect much. I play largely for fun and because it helps my World Pinball Player ranking, because C Division isn't counted.

Part of the problem was I felt out of sorts all day. I had a dehydration headache despite drinking water and Gatorade. Even my for-fun games weren't that impressive, though I managed a pretty good White Water game.

After a while I pretty much gave up. The wife and I went to the hotel, then wandered around until we found someplace that wasn't decorated in decaying steel-town chic for a nice dinner. That night I studied the CSI rules.

On the plus side, I did find a roll of tokens that someone had lost, and greedily kept it for myself.

The next day I was up early and ended up wandering around Carnegie trying to find milk for my cereal. While I was walking I found a little rubber snake on the ground, which I was hoping would augur great things for that day and ended up keeping it in my pocket for the rest of the trip... let's see how well that worked out.

So I showed up at PAPA World HQ and dawdled a while before I threw in another entry. The highlight of that one was an IM score that was 150K less than my previous respectable one, and a bunch of crap. I did put in two Classics IIIs... one was kind of a junky one on Mystic, Embryon, Gorgar, and my personal fave Tri-Zone... this was a little sad, because I had some great practice scores on the latter three that morning. After I saw how all the cool kids were ganging up on Embryon and especially Mystic, in my second entry I swapped them out for Evel Knievel and the EM Safari and did pretty well... had a good Tri-Zone which was 8th place overall, Safari was #24 and Gorgar was OK, and I ended up in 36th place out of 117.

Then it was dinner time and I had decided to go to the league dinner -- this turned out to be on par with the rest of the weekend. I talked my usually non-sociable wife into going, and aside from some brief conversation about anime with another guy, generally just watched the TVs in the restaurant (we later found out she was getting sick, so I can't completely blame her). I was seated next to someone who wasn't particularly talkative that night, someone who is like nails on chalkboard to me, and a guy who hadn't even played in league for 9 years who I could not communicate with -- didn't understand my jokes and couldn't fathom anything I said. My wife and I split a meal and our two halves together were what I expected our portions to be. And I still had my dehydration headache. As soon as our bill was paid I was out of the door like a shot. Then we ended up taking some wrong turns thanks to detours, so after dropping my wife off at the hotel I didn't make it back until 10 or 11.

It was time for a change in strategy. First I took some aspirin and started chugging water and Gatorade to deal with my headache. Clearly the games I was playing weren't going my way, so I tried out a Simpsons they had on the floor and I couldn't stop -- granted it was set to Novice settings, but I ended up with the GC and actually made it to Alien Invasion, way better than I've ever done before. So my final entry was an all-Stern lineup: CSI, IM, WoF, Simpsons, and Rolling Stones. Even with the upper playfield left flipper being too weak for me to get more than one ball locked despite numerous shots, I still managed a #29 score. I finally had the Stones score I deserved, which was good for #34. The other scores were junk. But when the dust cleared, I ended up in 50th place: Not just in the top tercile, but in the top quartile! That's a full 8% better! Well, OK, it sucks, but it sucks less than my next lowest entry, which would have put me around 66th place and have been a major disappointment. And on my gigantic 27" monitor, my entry shows one line up from the bottom of the first page. That's good for something.

I was thinking about parlaying my newly energized self into another entry, but I got wrapped up in a good game of Tales of the Arabian Nights (high score #1!) and half missed/half ignored the closing of entries around 2 AM. So my finish was a little disappointing, but at least I moved forward and out of the 60s.

The next day we packed up and got ready to go. My wife was really not feeling well and Ol' Scruffy at the hotel desk would only give us an extra half hour to get out of the room. But get out we did, we made it over to PAPA and I watched the A Div finals, which featured some pretty awesome play and an actual nail-biter final game where any of the top three guys could have one it and it wasn't decided until the last ball. We left pretty soon after that -- my wife didn't even feel like playing a closing game of Pang Pang Paradise.

I ended up driving the whole way home, which I didn't really want to do but kind of had to. About halfway home I realized that I must have left my PAPA swag bag with my t-shirt back at the hotel. Eh. It was pretty typical of the entire weekend, and 1) It wasn't that great a bag, unlike the awesome overnight back we got last year, and 2) I'm a little sad about losing the shirt, but on the other hand I don't need any more reminders of how sucky PAPA 14 was for me. On the plus side, the last hour of our drive home it was thundering and lightninging constantly, which was kind of cool.

And just to top off the suckiness with a suck cherry: I had scheduled Monday as a vacation day but ended up having to work half a day because we had a deadline to meet the next day. And while I was unpacking the car I discovered that I'd left half our supply of Gatorade at the hotel too. It just keeps on sucking.

Off to PAPA for the Weekend!

Well, Mrs. Entropy and I are heading off to Pittsburgh today for PAPA 14. I'm hoping to actually break into the top tercile of the bottom tier, but we'll see. I did have a bit of existential doubt about whether my nice finish at Pinburgh morally obligates me to compete in the B Division instead of my usual C. I put the question to the FSPA league mailing list, and the response that put be over the edge came from the guy who pasted my ass to the wall with Gorilla Glue on Monday (which caused me to go from 1st to 3rd place in our last night before the finals... nice). To paraphrase him, basically PAPA divisions are bosses, and to level up you need to beat the first boss, in this case C Division. So I've decided that to move on to B Div I should put up a decent showing in C, not this 61st/62st place bullshit I've done the last two years. I've got high hopes: C Division's games this year include Rolling Stones, which has served me well in league this season (with the possible exception of last Monday night); Terminator 2, which of course I own (and got a whopping THREE Super Jackpots on the same ball a few days ago, despite the lamps that indicate where to shoot being out and having to use the lamp column display problem to figure out which of the jackpot lights is lit); and Wheel of Fortune, which I have the high score on at Volleyball House (though to be fair, to this day I have no idea how I scored so high). So as I say every year: We shall see.

And since I've got a theme going here, these are this week's museum repairs: My two undisputed successes are I replaced a broken drop target on Big Bang Bar and I fixed the lamp board on Indiana Jones. Sadly, the drop target was just a blank one I found in the bottom of the cabinet, not one with a decal on it. The IJ lamp board I pulled and took home, fixed and tested in Wednesday night (there were some burned out bulbs, bad connections, and one or two sockets that had broken and needed resoldering), then Zoe Entropy installed it (!!! The issue is following in the footsteps of her sire) Thursday when she went in to work. I glanced at it when I went in for some pre-PAPA practice after work... there are still a few bulbs out, and I'm suspecting they're bad connections at the plug. But the resoldered lamps were working, so you can tell if you've spelled the ENT of ADVENTURE.

I also looked into a "weak kicker" on Safe Cracker. That turned out to be a perfectly good but poorly aimed kicker, which was kicking the ball into a wireform, which caused the ball to rattle back and forth in the lane, slowing it down to the point where it couldn't make it out of its lane, giving the impression of weakness. 50K rgp poster Lloyd T. Olson suggested I bend it slightly to the left to re-aim it, so I'll try that next time I go in (probably NOT next Tuesday, since we have a big project to finish at work and I'll probably be in a post-PAPA pinball funk). While I was in SC I checked a switch it said was bad, which turned out to be a drop target whose spring had come off. I reattached it, and in the process found out how difficult SC is to work on... it's tiny size makes it so everything is packed in so tightly that it's virtually impossible to do anything without taking a bunch of adjacent stuff apart.

And in the Good/Bad Omen Department: When I went in the the museum last night I did some pre-PAPA flipping. Largely sucked, but did get my first Super Jackpot on Creature, and it would have been doubled except that the museum's game only registers 1 letter for each ramp shot instead of the usual two (or three if you're Bowen) so it takes twice as many ramps to spell Creature. Anyway, hopefully that is the foretaste of victory and the crappy other games I played were not the anticipation of suck. Again, we'll see in about 8 hours.

All I Do These Days is Museum Repairs

Well, not all. I have gotten my basement closer to being a usable arcade... Eight Ball Deluxe and Terminator are set up, though EBD leans like a mofo and the leg with the greatest influence is hard to get to. Really, so is Paragon, but on a lark I turned it on last night and it was acting kookier than usual. It acts like it's in attract mode, but when you press the button it makes the start-of-game sound & deducts a credit, but then doesn't do anything else and continues in attract mode. In league news, I've been in the unprecedented (for me) position of #1 in A Division for four straight weeks, and with one week to go I am mathematically assured of getting into the playoffs. I've got a 6 point lead over the #2 & 3 players so it's feasible that I could be #1 in playoffs even with a mediocre score for week 10. I think that gives me valued game picks in the playoffs, which is always fun... as well as something I haven't gotten for some time, since when I've actually made the playoffs I've usually been in last place going in.

So, at the museum on Tuesday I got a few more things done. I spent most of the time bending the diverter linkage on Indiana Jones into a workable facsimile of what it should be, and that fixed it. When I tested it I made a few shots to the Path of Adventure, which cleared the switch errors; now Indiana Jones is credit-dot free. ^_^ I also changed tactics with the sticking left flipper and changed the coil stop -- albeit from what turned out to be a somewhat rusty mechanism that had mushroomed, so I had to clean and file it down somewhat -- which did the trick. My new theory is that the coil stop had become lightly magnetized over time, and that was causing the plunger to stick to it. Spent some time giving it a bit of a makeover... I replaced the shredded plastic posts around the INDY lanes with better ones that I cannibalized from T2 leftovers. And I replaced a couple of GI bulbs and tried to get as many of the lamps replaced as possible. Unfortunately, there are a couple of sockets on two of the boards that aren't making good connections, so I'll probably bring those boards home on Tuesday and re-solder them (this worked pretty well with the STTNG big lamp board, and I'm hoping for similar results).

Speaking of Star Trek, I've gotten kind of tired of the slingshots popping out of the rubber. One of the things I've noticed about the museum's games is that a lot of them have slingshot rubbers that are about 1/2" too large, so I'm constantly tucking the kicker back into the rubber until I get tired of it and replace the rubber. Unfortunately, the meager parts store in the back had only one 4" rubber, and that was clearly intended to be a reference piece. However, they sell rubber in the gift shop -- at prices that are a little steep imo -- so my daughter found the 4" bag and gave me two.

And finally, the Avatar Link gate wasn't staying up because a little donut attachment that holds the gate up had fallen off, which I figured out from comparing the assembly diagram from the downloaded manual to reality. I found the sheered off screw that probably was supposed to be holding it on, but not the part itself. I'd been in contact with the Stern Tech Support guy and he said that he would send me out the piece because it was still under warranty. However, I played the game on Thursday while waiting for my daughter and the gate was staying up again... I'm guessing that the real repair guy had been in and fixed it somehow. Anyway, I'll look at it for sure next Tuesday.

So next week is going to be too too fun: Week 10 of league on Monday, pull and fix the IJ lamp boards on Tuesday, relax on Wednesday (phew), return the (hopefully) fixed boards on Thursday, then toodle up to Pittsburgh on Friday for the weekend at PAPA. And that's a Full Week of Pinball for you.

More Tales of Maintenance

First, another fan-gush for Wizard of OZ... just read about+saw the playfield pic on Pinball News, and it looks pretty darn cool. Definitely a welcome departure from the current generation of Stern "make this shot three times to start a mode" design philosophy... not that I dislike the last couple of years of Stern games, but seeing WOZ as it develops makes me think I've been missing the variety that comes with a second pinball company.

Last Tuesday I took another day off to work on games at the museum. It turns out my timing was poor, because that happened to be the day before Mrs. Entropy's birthday -- which I also took as vacation, by the way -- but she saw me wanting to spend most of the day at the museum as an indication that I didn't want to spend time with her. How she leaped that chasm of faulty logic to arrive at her conclusion I'll never know, but I managed to smooth things over mainly by pointing out all of the times she's wandered away from me physically and mentally which I did not take as an indication that our marriage was over (such as her fanatical devotion to a zombie podcast or the recent binge of Facebook games, which she basically spent the entire month of June playing).

So, maintainin' the games: Based on my data set of two, my day-long binges seem to always involve one game that is a huge thorn in my side. This time it was Indiana Jones, on which I had my own personal pinball adventure. The problem that kicked things off was a sticky flipper, which I worked on for a while and managed to not fix. But I also looked at the test report and found that the game reported a whole bunch of switch errors on the mini-playfield. When I tested them they worked fine, but then I noticed that the diverter that sends the ball to the Path of Adventure vs the ramp was not opening all the way, which kept the ball from making it to the mpf. Taking a look, it appeared that the diverter had become disconnected from the linkage to the coil and some goofy jury-rigged solution on it. I looked up one part of the linkage on Marco and it looked fine, then spent a bunch of time trying to make the jury-rigging work until I finally gave up. Later, at home, I had the presence of mind to look up the other end of the linkage and found that what I thought was jury-rigging was the actual part, which may have broken but was reparable. So if it's still messed up on Tuesday, I have a picture of the part as it's supposed to look, so I should be able to fix it accordingly.

After that miserable failure, I moved on to another personally irritating project: Black Knight. Instead of a spinner, the museum's BK has always had a roll-under gate; this makes it somewhat re: tarded because when it lights for 2,500, a roll-under will give you two or maybe three scores, whereas a spinner will give you whole bunches. Luckily, I had a spare spinner assembly! You see, when I got my BK 10-ish years ago, it had the wrong spinner on it. So I got a correct one on eBay, but that auction was for the entire spinner assembly and I just needed the thing that did the spinning. Synchronicity! So I bought a BK spinner sticker set at the former Pinball Wizards show in May and I found the spinner stuff I had bought while organizing the basement a few weeks ago. I installed everything, spent a little more time than I expected adjusting it, and at the figurative end of the day I had a Black Knight with the proper parts.

While I had BK open I decided to run it through some diagnostics because it's a little wonky. Surprisingly, the switch and solenoid tests passed, but the lamp test had some issues... but they turned out (as we can see on the right) to be strictly regimented issues, which I suppose are the best kind of issues to have. So the lamps that are out either fall in one of two columns or one row, which should make trouble shooting a little easier. But that's a job for another day.

Then there was some this and that things I did: Avatar's flipper was supposedly sticking, but I couldn't reproduce it, though I did find that the Link gate wasn't staying up... need to look into that. I tried to fix the dollar bill slot on Breakshot but to no avail. I retrieved a stuck ball in the traditional position on Guns 'n' Roses, on the plastic next to the lower pop bumper (clearly Slash was remiss in his play testing). I think that was all I did. If I ever get another full fixin' day at the museum -- and I'm unlikely to, at least in its current location -- I'll have to try not to get stuck on one particular game to the exclusion of all others. o_O;

The Extremely Productive 2.5 Hours

But first, the coolest news of all: The guy who operates most of the games at our league just sent an email that he's putting a down-payment on a Wizard of Oz and is going to put it on location at one of the league joints when it comes out in December (ish). Another guy in our league is buying one, but he lives about 2 hours away from me, so it will be nice to have one a little closer.

So I went to the museum on Tuesday for my volunteer stint and got a ker-app load of stuff done, including a bunch of interesting fixes.

First, I reattached the subway ramp to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which has been quite the thorn in my side (and probably warrants its own post). Spoiler alert: One of the divertors broke off and a fixer in my league welded it back together for me. Anyway, it worked great. The only things really remaining were the right flipper wouldn't hold and the spinner didn't work -- very annoying for me, because Warp 9 is my new favorite mode in ST -- and probably caused by the same thing since the spinner is part of the flipper switch circuit. A quick look showed that a wire was dangling off the right flipper coil, so I quickly re-soldered it and that fixed both problems. Star Trek is now working for the first time in at least a month!

Next the Black Knight challenged me. It made annoying sounds during attract mode and would not eject balls when the game was over, which if there were no balls in the plunger trough kept you from starting a new game. The Internet told me that the sound problem was most likely an issue with the connection from the sound board to the CPU, so a quick un/re-plug job fixed it for now. I wasn't able to reproduce the ball restart problem, so hopefully that was a temporary problem (the Internet has an answer for that too, resetting the game to factory settings, so we'll keep that tucked away until we need it). It's working well enough for now, but it has a lot of switches and lamps out which will be annoying to fix.

Since WHO dunnit was right next to BK I decided to fix a problem that's annoyed ME, the center targets not working. I opened it up and found that the screws holding the target bank were loose in the playfield, so the cam that raises and lowers the targets had come out of the slot, and pulled a wire from one of the targets for good measure. Soldered that and filled the screw holes with wood putty. After it dried I reattached the target bank, and now it works great! It has some switch and lamp problems too, but those are for another day.

Game Four was a special request: A guy from my league who hangs out at the museum a lot mentioned that the extra ball/buy in button didn't work on Twilight Zone. Opened up the game and found that the button was loose in its housing, so I just snapped it snugly in and it worked. While I was there I re-glued one of the goofy after-market toys that the museum curator loves to put on his games -- this isn't the Smithsonian, after all. It's a TV that's supposed to show video clips from the show, and it doesn't even work (but that's not my problem). I just re-glued it to keep it from interfering with the game.

The final game fix of the night was Guns N' Roses, which I've grown to like lately... like a lot of DE/Sega games, I've found it grows on me. But I've noticed that the Guns ramp has stopped scoring. It turns out the plug on the upper switch had come out (are you sensing a pattern here?) and just had to be re-plugged in, though because of the location of the switch I had to get my daughter to hold up the playfield while I reached around and reconnected it. During testing I scored a Jackpot on said ramp. Yay for me!

And that was my exciting day. I took next Tuesday off so I could go in and work on games for the whole day, which I did once before and had a huge amount of fun doing. And seeing a variety of issues is really helping me stretch my repair muscles more than they've been stretched before. I heartily recommend volunteering to fix pins at your local establishment.

Volunteering

A few months ago I put in an application to volunteer to fix games at the National Pinball Museum. I interviewed with my daughter, then museum director David Silverman asked me a few questions, then I got the job. So for the past couple of months I come in after work on Tuesdays and fix games.
There's a guy that fixes the games, but from what I've seen he fixes games like an operator fixes games -- so if the ball doesn't register when you shoot it into Rudy's mouth, so what? You can still play it. That's what the ball search is for. I try to get the games into the kind of condition I want them in when I play them.
At first I came in figuring I'd use the museum's tools, but with the exception of a very nice soldering iron the museum's tools are either terrible or missing (for example: There are I think three sets of socket wrenches on the shelf, but not one driver that works with any of them). So next week I brought in my tool box. Then I discovered that the museum also didn't have a partiuclarly good collection of spare parts. So next week I brought in my parts box. Now I just have a luggage cart with 4 tool/parts boxes on it, plus my laptop which I've loaded up with manuals and reference. If I had infinite time and patience, I would probably organize the tool area into something that people could actually use. 
Typically of any collection of games, every game that needs fixing is a rabbit hole that you just keep falling into. So for example, Funhouse. It had two problems listed: Rudy's mouth and the P target didn't work. I also wanted to fix something I thought was kind of stupid: David loves to put add-ons in his game, and in Funhouse he'd attached a promotional plastic to the left slingshot. But he'd attached it in such a way that the ball would sometimes hit it.
The P target was easy: One of the wires had broken off, so I resoldered it. Rudy's mouth was also pretty simple: Of the 6 screws holding the kicker and Rudy's head to the playfield, there were only two installed, which caused the kicker to droop so the switch wouldn't close when the ball was in it. A quick look in the cabinet turned up the other 4 screws, so I screwed them in. Problem solved. Although I wanted desperately to remove the promo plastic, instead I just raised it up so the ball wouldn't interfere with it.
While I was digging around in the cabinet for the screws, I found an envelope. Inside were a set of Cliffy Protectors that David had ordered almost 10 years ago and never installed. So I installed the hole protector (the ramp protectors were a lot more involved).
Finally, I noticed that the mylar on the playfield was bubbling up, especially around the clock inserts. Not much I could do about that, so I had to leave it.
When all was said and done, the game was pretty much working correctly. It didn't even have a credit dot! I pointed this out to my daughter, and she didn't realize what the credit dot was. So a few days later she asked their tech about it, and he said that the credit dot doesn't necessarily mean the game is broken, because it can come on if someone hasn't hit a particular switch for a while (!!!). So when my daughter told me that, my first thought was: Yeah, dumbass, so why don't you hit that switch and see if it still works? Like I said, he fixes games like an operator.
Tonight was an extra big night: I spent 4 hours in the trenches. The autoplunger wasn't working on Guns 'n' Roses, which turned out to be a blown fuse (and of course, that particular fuse wasn't in the fuse box, but luckily I found one sitting on a work table), and while I was in there I replaced a bunch of burned out bulbs. Next I worked on Indiana Jones, which was ejecting two balls into the plunger lane. I was worried that it was a bad opto board, but the switch test showed that the trough switches were working fine. A little more poking around showed that there was a ball in the idol lock, for a total of 7 balls in a six ball game. Removing one ball fixed that problem.
The left flipper on Jurassic Park wasn't working, and a quick inspection showed that a ball was trapped in the raptor kicker (this has happened before). The flipper had basically fallen apart, so I just fixed the nut and screw out of the cabinet and reassembled it. I freed the ball and repositioned the kicker, hopefully for good. I also installed a set of Cliffy Protectors which I had ordered. Nice!
The lockdown bar on Stargate didn't close, and they had taped the door closed. Turns out the bar just needs to be whacked down smartly before it would close. I also retrieved the lock pieces from the cabinet and put it back together.
Lights Camera Action also had a non-working left flipper, and the problem was pretty much the same as Jurassic Park, but in this case the linkage had fallen apart and I couldn't fix it without a new one. Since it was getting late, I noted it on the fixit list and moved on to the last game, Barb Wire. Balls keep getting stuck in the Retinal Scanner, and the problem turned out to be a flaky connection to the kicker. I noted that it should probably be resoldered.
And other than being particular long, that was my day fixing games at the NPM. There were a few more that I wish I was able to get to (I also bought a protector for Star Trek TNG and newer Funhouse protectors which I wish I could have installed, and I'd really like to tear into Star Trek and fix a bunch of crap on it). Ideally the museum won't close for good next Monday so I'll have another opportunity to finally get more of those games tuned up. Of course, what would be best would be if I could just take a game home every few weeks, give it some TLC and care for it like a game should be cared for, then return it to the museum.

9 1/2 Months

I am a nut for to-do lists, so much so that I save them. Here are a couple of items from the last months: 

Christmas 2010 - Blog
Feb 2011 - Update blog
3/4/11 - blog!
5/6/11 - start bloggin

Etc. Unfortunately, blogging is always harder than not blogging, and the longer you don't blog the larger the backlog of things to write about becomes... I'm reminded of a diary that I kept religiously in the early 80's that eventually became a many pages long to-do list of things to write about, until finally I got to the point where I couldn't remember what my cryptic comments meant. 

But there comes a time in a boy's life when he has to shit or get off the pot... so be prepared for me to take a massive dump on you, my loyal readers.

Here's what I've done lo, these many months, in no particular order:

• Got Terminator 2 up and running, even to the point of it making its public debut
• Loaned two games out for a league party
• Did not make the league playoffs for the first time since I started
• Participated in the Pinburgh tournament against some of the best players in the world, and came in ninth (yeah, you heard me... Ninth, bitches!)
• Added mapping to the Pinball Locator
• Got my league back to reporting our stats to the World Pinball Ranking website
• Was solicited to help bring the PARS rating system back to life
• Organized my basement to the point where I could actually get to most of my games, but then a bunch of stuff happened that made it all fall apart
• Attended the opening of the National Pinball Museum in December, which my daughter was instrumental in getting to happen
• Started volunteering to help fix games at the National Pinball Museum, which is fun and educational
• Mourned the possible closing of the National Pinball Museum in July, which my daughter didn't really have much to do with
• Got a crapload of new playfields for my playfield project, which I have non-bindingly vowed will move forward this year

And there's probably a bunch of other junk which I can't remember. In the next few days/weeks/months I'll probably write about one or more of these things and a few more besides.

So, to subtly reference the massive dump metaphor one last time: Let's get a move on.