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First, a quick pinball repair tip. I was talking to Scott, the guy who cares for the games at John's Place where my league night is, about my sticking Who flipper. He suggested using a little teflon lubricant where the big metal thing is hanging up on the End of Stroke switch. When I mentioned that I had thought lubes verboten in pins, he said this stuff was OK. The Internet confirmed his recommendation, so I picked some up from Radio Shack in a handy pen dispenser. I just tried it tonight and it works great. I applied a few drops sparingly to the big metal thing, worked the flipper action a few times, then played a sticky-flipper-free game. Thanks, Pinball Repair Man!
My work closes early on Fridays during summer, so I took a pinball road trip to Loudoun County, VA, where there were a purported five locations with games. It took about 5 hours and I ended up driving about 100 miles, but I managed to investigate them all. Four of the five were still there, and I spanked three of them, getting high scores on a Family Guy, Revenge from Mars, and almost a billion on old-school Indiana Jones.
Now, to be fair, RfM and IJ were 5 ball games, and instead of specials they gave out extra balls. But still... where is this kind of playing on league nights? The locations were two bowling alleys and two pizza places. One pizza place had a Road Show and Hurricane, which was awesome until I started playing them: They were in terrible shape. The bulldozer didn't register hits in Road Show, and Hurricane had bad switches and weak flippers. Barf. I won't even Google Map the location because the games were so bad. On t'other hand the second pizza place, Lovettsville Pizza & Subs, was frickin' awesome. This place is in the middle of Bugfuck, VA, but the games were in awesome shape. Three of the four games were working, they were clean (!!!), and they were all 5 balls. Granted, it was cramped because apparently the Little League season had just ended and the party was there. But I was really surprised at how well the games were maintained, especially coming from the previous pizza place. I also found a bunch of Gameboy games in one of the bowling alleys, and instead of turning them in I kept 'em. Probably bad in the long run karmically, but what the hell... until Karma strikes me down, I'll be playing Mario DS.
I did a little more work on the Google Earth KML file of pinball locations... mostly in the form of correcting issues with the Pinball Locator database. Here is the file if you want to download it (right click and save as... no browser I've seen knows what to do with it). Note that it won't work in Google Maps, because GM has a 60-200 point limit and this file has 850 or so active sites.
At first I offered the file to the Pinball Rebel himself, suggesting that he could post it on his site. But he did what he usually does: Send me two emails, then just when I think we're making progress he stops replying. This same thing happened a few months ago when I mentioned that I might be capable of fixing some bugs (a few of which I consider serious) and adding a spatial search to the Locator. I don't know if the Rebel has a short attention span or if he and I email in different dialects of the English language... if I were to go to Texas speak to him directly, we could probably hash it out pretty quickly. For now, if I can't get my point across to him in two emails, I'm pretty much doomed. Whatever.
Finally, I made a Mr. Pinball Classified sale today. A guy in Florida needed a transformer and everything downstream from it to the wall socket for a WPC game. I didn't think I had a spare transformer, but I had the rest, purchased years ago from my old pal Pinball Chuck (who is selling again on eBay, I was happy to see) for something or other. Anyway, even though this FL guy is working on a "Black Knight" (I'm assuming it's really a BK2K) he went for it, even after I raised the price from $10 to $20 (the receipt was in the box when I found it, and it looked virtually brand new, so I couldn't let it go for the lower price). But then as I was looking for the post where I mentioned this purchase, I found a reference to the High Speed transformer...! So I went downstairs, and what I thought was the Data East transformer I pulled out of Doctor Who was the one from HS. So I just emailed back the guy to see if he's interested. Looking at some of my other posts, transformers sell for some serious shekels, so if FL Guy is interested I might get some serious bank. w00t!
Today is Bloomsday, when fans of James Joyce celebrate the day that Ulysses takes place. My wife had her own version of Bloomsday today because she had an appointment with Dr. Bloom. That has nothing to do with pinball, I just thought I'd throw that in.
I saw a great eBay auction description for a prototype Doctor Who game. I personally don't think it's an actual prototype, because the pictures of the Dalek motor assembly look exactly like the Wobble Head kit that I bought last year. But here's the description:
Up for bids is a fantastic operating coin operated arcade pinball machine called "Dr. Who" by Bally in 1992. Plays and functions extremely well including the davit robot topper which is a mechanical moving topper as it turns it's head left to right vice versa while lights up duration it's vocial animation! Sheldon found on Dr. Who machines as it was a prototype that never made it to the regular production due to production costs and Bally was looking for ways to trim production costs hence the mechanical topper. In the production version machines has the non-mechanical davik robot that just lights up during vocial animation. Believe me, it makes the game so much more animated and exciting to play with the mechanical robot instead of the regular version which is a dud (boring). Any questions let me know as the photos should answer your questions as photos of the motor inside the davik robot body are present as well as those showing the different positions of the davik head in mechanical motion while speaking w/ lights.
I have sheldon seen a description that I enjoyed so much. I think if the guy was trying to sound like a foreign scammer, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
I was kind of bored at work today, so while I was waiting for compilations to succeed I took the data from the Pinball Locator, geocoded it using one of my company's products, and turned it into a Google Earth KML file. The initial results were pretty satisfactory for the amount of time I spent on it... certainly easier than writing a web page to do it, which was my original plan. There are a few data errors... for example, you can see on the pic two spellings of Crofton Bowling Center that register as two separate locations. The most discouraging thing about the project is that there don't appear to be many pin locations nearby that I haven't visited. :( Anyway, I'll probably refine the process a little and maybe post a cleaned up version somewhere when I'm done.
So I did go to the Virginia pinball league night sponsored by the Free State Pinball Association, and I did not turn around and go home or die or embarrass myself or say too much that I'm likely to regret. Good. For a person as notoriously lacking in social skills as I am, that's a huge win.
I showed up a few minutes before 8 and got signed up. I pretended that I actually was capable of normal social interaction and met a few people, most of whose names I forgot within seconds. I paid some dues then gravitated to the other noob for a little strained conversation, though a few guys took the initiative and talked to me, which was nice.
They started a few minutes late with a crowd of 20 or so. They explained the rules, which are more complicated than "play games, write down scores" but not overly so... certainly easier than bowling. We were cordoned off into groups of four and the games were allowed to begin. My group's first game was Strikes and Spares, and despite being distracted as always by Ms. SNS's stunningly erect areolae (curse you, Kevin O'Connor!) I was pleased to win just barely. That was followed by Skateball, then the Prominent Nipple theme was broken with Bram Stoker's Dracula, and finally Mousin' Around! I did adequately, usually a second or third place. With that we were done for the week, so I hung around for a few more minutes and then left.
I had fun. I plan to return. 'nuff said.
After quite some wait the LEDs finally arrived. I think I'll fully illuminate this subject in its own post, because it's kind of a big topic and I haven't fully investigated it yet.
And yesterday, after the Most Triumphant resolution to a client problem that's been weighing heavily on my soul for a week (who would have thought that a corrupt positive sign would prevent "0" from being converted from a string to an integer? Thanks, diligent Windows XP programmers!), I rewarded myself with a pinball game. I went to Beltway Chevron to play Funhouse -- I wanted to play a 4 player game so I could hear all of Chuckie's player nicknames -- but it was turned off. So I consoled myself with a couple of Family Guy games at the Italian restaurant. Who wants Chowdah?
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.
The next major zone of repairs was the coin door. The first step was to un-crimp the crappy job I did on the test button wires and use the crimping tool to make a set of nice, honest crimps. 
Also, I put them in the correct plug slots, so now the buttons won't be reversed. Testing had revealed that one of the coin slots had all of its parts, so I wired that up to the coin switch pins. Finally I had created a makeshift lamp circuit using old light sockets, wired it to the GI pins on the coin door board, and stuck them to the coin mechs using sticky foam that I picked up at Target. I tested and everything worked so well, I turned free play off and set it to 1 credit per quarter and 3 credits for two.
My coin door lamp circuit went through several iterations... I had to recall what little I remembered of my Electrical Engineering class in college. First I tried out the lamps in series, and that gave me one anemic light and one barely lit one. I went through three revisions.
/-- + Lamp - --\
V -- -- Gnd
\-- + Lamp - --/
This is the classic parallel circuit, but had too many wires that would clutter up the already cluttered coin door.
Then there was an interim design which I've forgotten. I took that, removed some useless connections, and wound up with this:
V -- + --- +
Lamp Lamp
- --- - --- Gnd
I liked this one because it was nice and spare... no Y intersections and a minimum of work for my meager soldering skillz. You can play follow the wires on the picture above to see how it played out in the real world.
When I switched off free play, I also made what (to me) is a change I never thought I would make: I reset the game to 3 balls per game.
Gasp.
Now, you have to understand that 5 balls per game has been Holy Writ since I first started playing 30 years ago. But the more I've played DW over the past few weeks, the more I've realized that it's designed to be a three ball game. With five balls, I end up getting too many features on a regular basis. And I have to say that since I made the switch my games are just a smidge more satisfying in a somewhat hard to quantify way.
Also, I have added a new item onto my list of things to do by summer's end: I'm going to swap the game into the other cabinet. I've been planning to restore the red areas of the cabinet sides using some kind of decal something-or-other that I was going to make myself using the other cabinet. I felt a kinship to the old cab because I still believe that it was originally a prototype with the moving Dalek head. But a few weeks ago wife said something that infected my mind with the idea of using the new cabinet, and the infection spread, reproduced, and eventually overpowered my loyalty to the old one. I mean, the new cab has all of its red in unfaded glory, fer cheese sakes. It has more flaws in it than the old one, but I now think those will be easier to repair than the Rube Goldberg decal thing I had planned.
And finally, here's what happened when Rosie discovered that I had connected the Dalek head:
Like I said, I've been actually getting a lot done on Doctor Who. First up, I decided to work on problems with the backbox, all lighting related: There was a bunch of GI out on the backbox light board, the Dalek GI was out, and only two of the Doctor lights worked.
First I decided to do something totally unrelated to lighting and reconnected the Wobble-head. That was pretty easy, but then I decided to ready the dome to be screwed back on. I noticed that if the dome was lined up with the screw holes, the eye stalk would bump into the inside of the dome when it moved. That didn't seem so cool, so I tried adjusting the mounting nuts to make the Dalek lean back, hoping this would reposition the eye as well. It didn't really. So I repositioned the dome so it's hanging over the top of the game slightly and left it at that. I emailed the guy who made it and he said he had never heard of this problem. In a world of mass conformity, I suppose it's comforting to be unique.
Next I moved on to the various GIs that were out. I checked voltages at the points where they exited the power board and didn't get much. Then I jumped a working strand of lights with a non-working one and that lit them... but then the stress of all those lights running on one circuit blew out the working strand. I think I lamented for a while, then looked up GI problems in the pinball repair guides. Mostly they focus on complicated stuff like replacing burned connectors and stressed circuits. That didn't sound so cool, but buried in the tough solutions was a relatively easy one: Replace the fuses. I did that, and now all my GI works fine. This imparted a valuable lesson to me which I knew but had forgotten: Check the simple stuff first. *sheesh*
Finally I pulled the light board for the 7 doctor lamps on the display mount. Six of them work when the display is face down, but when it's mounted in the game, only two work. I connected the board up to my power supply and found a legitimately bad twist-out light socket, which I replaced. But the Doctor 7 lamp worked when I tested it, so I surmised that it was a bad transistor on the power board or something. I put the board back in and was rewarded with six working Doctors, which I chalked up to yet another bad connection. Sylvester McCoy would have to wait for a future repair session.
And those were the backbox repairs. Mostly successful, can't complain.
Fortunately/unfortunately a lot is going on and I'm not writing any of it down.
Went to Pinball Wizards in Allentown two weeks ago. The night before I checked rgp to see if there were any up-to-the-minute reports, but all I found what this noob report. I was surprised that he did not point out that when he was walking around the Flea Market in the rain, he got wet.
Drive up was uneventful, except for seeing a truck shedding a retread and an Amish guy driving a buggy.
Spent yet another all-time low amount of money, $50 including admission and a pita sandwich at the Middle Eastern place in the farmer's market. There just wasn't much on my list... my games are working too well these days, or I already have the parts I need to fix them. There wasn't anything in the flea market that really jumped out at me, even though I brought a fat wad of cash with me after last year's Doctor Who incident.
There were some pretty good machines there, and several that were comically malfunctioning... such as the Funhouse that didn't have use of its left flippers, or the Mystic with no feature lights. But after so many years -- I think this might be my 10th year going to the show -- since I assume there will be a whole bunch of crappy games, I'm not as annoyed as I used to be. As with bad movies, the key is low expectations.
I did finally get to play the new Indiana Jones game, which I found reasonably fun. Unfortunately the sound was turned down too low for me to hear what is reportedly the worst Sean Connery impersonation that anyone has ever been paid to do. They had a CSI there, but it had a crowd and I didn't have a chance to play. And I did get to play the aforementioned Mystic, which I was looking forward to because I hadn't played it since my college days and I had co-done an adaptation of it in my VP salad days. I was kind of cheesed that it didn't work, because its tic-tac-toe conceit relies pretty heavily on feature lights. But I amused myself by sending a text message to my wife with a picture of the game and the text "Why are they hurting the Mystic?" which is hysterically if you've see The Fall.
I toyed with the idea of buying LEDs for Paragon to reduce its power needs, and even went to the point of trying to estimate the number of bulbs on one that was there, but when I showed up with cash in hand to the people hawking them said they were out of the #44/47 bulbs. Later I was sort of glad, because fixing Paragon's power problem by reducing the power consumption of the machine isn't really fixing it, it's just putting the problem off by a few years. Maybe that's cool for the National Debt, but this is pinball, which is serious. But that got me thinking about LEDs, and I think I'm going to buy some and install them on Quicksilver. Partly for fun, partly on the off chance that in a few years incandescents will be impossible to find, but mostly because QS is the most visually striking of all my machines and LED bulbs will probably make it more so. Their other-worldly glow is well-suited to the game and its theme of big-headed naked women in a dimension of liquid mercury.
On the way home, I finally stopped at Pakha's Thai House Restaurant, which is located outside of Harrisburg. I've been passing this place every year since it opened and have always been curious about it -- I wouldn't expect Dillsburg PA to be the center of a huge Thai community -- but the food was pretty good and pretty cheap. It appears to be where all the cool kids in the Harrisburg area hang out, and based on the photos behind the cash register, the Fox 43 news team from York is quite enamored with it.
