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.