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.