This will be a FAST Doctor!

I have finished cleaning the replacement playfeld, took the mylar off around the pop bumpers which was starting to lift, lots of novus 2 and a wax. I gave the back a light sand too. Its going to play really fast with this playfield installed. Still cleaning the inserts with que tips and window cleaner as they needed a clean but now each one has a little bit of sawdust from the sanding in them. Wishing i still had Kyle's compressor..

Here's some random before/after pics.

Won two beers this morning =)

Replacement playfield for Dr Who

Here it is, no mylar or raised/dropped inserts. Some very slight insert wear and that's being picky about it. It should clean up very nicely. I will use pretty much everything from the currently populated Dr Who playfield as it has all already been cleaned.

EX OP Fixes Safecracker right flipper

So an ex op mate dropped in last weekend cause he'd just finished a service call in my area, which turned out to be a BR replacement on a Bram Strokers Drac, anyway he pops in and has a game on SC and the right flipper goes dead. It has been doing this intermittently and he decided to get his hands dirty [for once] and have a look inside. He traced the problem back to being bad solder on the CPU board and went ahead and re-flowed some solder, with my tools i might add! So then he puts the board back in as pictured, we fire it up and its has worked great ever since! The funniest part is when he left he tried to charge me for 2 hours work, it made me lol. Thanks Colbert, glad shes working 100% now. Good times.

Dr Who cleaned

I Stripped and cleaned the playfield on Dr Who and rebuilt a couple of the working parts. I flame polished the ramps which came up great, you can actually see the ball coming back underneath the left ramp now to the upper left flipper. All the plastics are in very good condition except for the slingshots which will be replaced. The playfield came up nice but still has the horrible full mylar on it. Some inserts are starting to raise, some are starting to sink. There is a replacement playfield available for the game which will be getting swapped in soon. The inside of the cabinet still needs attention, apart from being filthy the bottom wood panel will need to be replaced or reinforced somehow, it feels like it might fall out if too much pressure is put on it. What i thought could be a GI problem on the right hand side of the playfield turned out to be about 10 blown GI bulbs.

Shadow regrets..

I didn't think i would but looking through some pic's just now has got me thinking, i really regret selling Shadow!

It is probably the most challenging and rewarding game i have played. I never did beat the final battle, read about it in a post below... this gives me another excuse to get another someday =)

The Super jackpot call is awesome and it also has what i think is the best video mode in a pinball [its actually a challenge]

Here's a couple of the pics i took when selling it

Dr Who Pinball Problems / Work

Dr Who, In my opinion is a great under rated game. I originally played it at Mark's house and especially loved the multiball and the combo's. I cant remember playing it in the 90's at all.

Dan has left his Dr Who at my house and it has the common problem of the mini playfield not rising properly which in my opinion kills the game play so i decided to try to fix it. I basically made one good gear box from two bad ones and it still doesn't work properly, there were broken gears and gears missing teeth in both gearboxes. I then tested it and it gets to about half way up on the second level and stops. The motor still sounds like its turning but there is no movement on the gearbox side of the assembly. Originally the playfield did not move at all but sounded like it wanted to. In total i tore the gearbox down and took the mini playfield out of the game about 4 times and Brendan came and looked over it all too and we cleaned / re-lubed all the gears. We concluded that the main gear was spinning on the shaft. Hopefully a new gearbox/motor will fix the problem.

The game also had reset issues and did not display anything when powered on so i replaced the power driver and dmd controller board with the known working ones from my WH20 project which eliminated both these issues. The opto boards which control the optos on the second stage of the mini playfield [the grey round targets] are also hacked to bits from previous work done to them and will need replacing. Brendan is now servicing the original power driver board... bloody BR's!!! lol

I have rebuilt the lower flippers, the EOS switches were pretty bad so i replaced them, the return springs and the coil sleeves. The left flipper also got a new crank/plunger just because i had a few spares lying around. The coil stops were not replaced but probably should be. Standard sized flipper bats were also installed.

One further thing to note, lots of mouse shit was found inside the cab!

I also made a small video of the error;

Updated WH2O pictures

Just a couple of shots of the playfield as it sits today. I put the playfield into the cabinet the other day and it has changed the way i look at the machine, for those that don't know this has been a 2 1/2 year project mainly due to lack of motivation to finish it. I had parts of the machine scattered in 10 different parts of the house. I spent a lot of money on new parts and had to draw the line somewhere with trying to make it "perfect". Now i just want to play it and crank out some triple jackpots!!

The first picture shows a star post i have substituted to fill a gap that a ramp protector normally would. The original ramp protector was riveted to the ramp [hacked on] and cut off. This star post should work ok and wont block the entrance to the ramp at all, the ramp flap should sit just about next to it, this will leave the right hand entrance of the ramp with no protection but not the end of the ramp, which should sit flush behind the star post. The first contact for ball to ramp will be on the inside wall of the ramp and the new ramps are a fair bit thicker than the originals so i think it will be ok. I will be on the lookout for the ramp protector though but have not ever seen one for sale. I hope you can understand what i mean, after reading it back to myself it sounds pretty confusing!

Note the LED's in the whirlpool, ive gone blue, white, blue, white, blue, white with ablaze 3-led's. I don't know, we'll see how it looks, it may need to be changed.

The middle light bounce back target has a small chip off the bottom, i have replacements but they are a different tone of red, so i think ill just leave it on there.

I have used slightly smaller white rubbers in the pop bumper area, i put the same size as the manual said but they didn't feel very tight. An ex OP mate <-- haha, said that you should always use a slightly smaller rubber if you are going with white, slingshot rubbers being the exception. They feel much tighter after doing so and should have some really nice bounce but do not feel overly tight.

Check out the photo of the lower part of the WH2O playfield on the "drawing" setting on my camera, i like it =)

Still plenty of work to be done to this machine, thanks for reading!