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;