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!