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!

What? He's actually working on it!? =)

Yes, ive got the bug back and want to play WH20 which means putting it back together. Today i sanded the head and put some filler on it. Stay tuned for more progress...

Cracked 6 Billion on WCS today!

Just finished a very long game than ended with me getting the newest HSTD, Just a touch over 6Billion which beat my previous high score of 4.5billion and you need 2.5bill+ to get your name in. I had several good games in a row but each game ended around 1 billion, on the score breaking game i lost my first ball at 1 billion but still had 2 extra balls, 1 from the second TV mode and collected one from the striker award. I started multi-ball about 6 times on the way and milked the victory laps pretty hard and then snatched another extra ball after lighting it when i got to Washington. I eventually got to the World Cup Final and beat Germany 7-5. I used a new tactic all together and only focused on the right flipper, id plunge a ball, take a shot @ goal, plunge a ball, take a shot @ goal etc etc. It gets very stressful if you miss too many in a row and Germany get even or in front! I never noticed how much the light show throws you off during the world cup final either, the lights go from fully on to completely off and then half the playfield will be lit and half not etc, these cycles all happen pretty quickly and it kind of stuns you. After i beat Germany i tried not to get in the zone that "ah Ive done it, Ive beaten the game" and lose focus, instead i kept trying to re-light multi-ball and milk more victory laps and the 250mill for beating Germany.

I have also been practising and trying to stop making what i call "nothing shots", shots with no purpose and shots being made just for the sake of hitting the ball. I have been trying to control the ball a lot more and having a target for each shot. I have always kind of done this but still made "nothing shots" which usually led to me getting a bad bounce and a drain.

Just quickly i had a good game on shadow today and got 3 shots away from winning the final battle, damn its intense..

Anyway i didn't mean on writing this much but just got carried away =) I love both of these games!

Cya/s [I'm assuming at least 1 person reads these posts lol]

Neil

World Cup Soccer 94 FIXED today!

Well today i shopped world cup and fixed some issues that have pissed me off for some time and some issues that just had to be fixed for the game to work properly. I spent a good 9 hours today stripping the playfield, fixing everything and then re-populating it.

I did the following;

* Drilled through the playfield to fix both the pieces of metal behind the saucer kickouts [pictured below]. They had taken such a beating over time that the screws just didn't "grab" the wood anymore and after a few games they would almost come loose and almost onto the playfield, it was really affecting game play. I got 2 longer screws and matching nuts and some washers for each kickout and drilled though will a small drill bit on my cordless dremel, pretty easy work and the result was excellent, they arnt going anywhere now =)

* Installed new standup targets in front of the left ramp. The game still had the original targets there and they were beat to hell, obviously the new targets look and register a lot better. I am actually getting pretty good at soldering now.

* I had a nagging problem with one of the lamps in a pop bumper, everytime it got hit or touched the lamp would dimm and sometimes turn off then come back on, then dimm again etc etc. I took the cap off and to my horror one of the legs on the lamp socket had broken. I have plenty of spares of the original flat lead sockets so i went ahead and installed one. I don't want to say too much about it apart from the fact that i got it done and its working fine now.. and the pop's have green LED's in them. It was a frustrating and fiddly job!

* I installed LED's in both the inserts and GI. I never used to be a fan of LED's in GI but am all for them now, there is so much more light and really makes a huge difference. The colours really pop out at you now, especially on the W-O-R-L-D-C-U-P inserts which got purple LED's. I will put a video of the game on YouTube tomorrow so other world cup owners or pinheads can see how it looks. I will probably do the same video for Shadow which also looks great with LED's

* The goalie needed a new target, goalie plastic? [the actual piece of plastic the goalie decal sticks on] and a new decal. It went really well although i had to substitute some parts as some got damaged/threaded and were just plain worn out from the original assembly. Pictured below is the finished goalie, only thing i hadn't done was snip the cable ties, i only had red, the original were clear.. meh. It seems to register hits better now and the new target feels more flexible and id say it'll last a long time. I also got it running quite a bit smoother/quieter. Check out the pics below.

* I installed black flipper bats with black flipper rubber, i really like the control that black flipper rubber gives and the black bats just look really cool IMO. I also rebuilt the right flipper because i wasn't happy with it. All good now.

Apart from all that i gave the playfield the once over with Novus 2 then Novus 1 and did a general clean, it wasn't really dirty to begin with though. Its pretty much finished now with no nagging issues and plays and looks 110%. I put a couple of test games through it but will probably have a real game tomorrow, might have to check the level first though.

I re-listened to a few topcasts today while working on it, Gomez and Kaminkow being a couple and really enjoyed them.

Thanks for reading and keep flippin' =)

Neil.

Playing shadow

I just finished playing a few games on shadow, on my last game i got the new high score on my machine with 2.6 billion. I reached the final battle and missed out with 1 more shot to complete!! This is the second time its happened to me and the third time I've reached the final battle. I had final battle lit on my last ball but the ball drained, this would have been the second final battle on the same credit. I love the lead-in to the final battle, it gets you pumped loll and i love this game!

Shadow tweaking

Today i adjusted the shadow flippers to be very accurate and also adjusted the ramp diverters. I was having a problem with tightening the one on the left ramp. I also put the flashers back on the backboard and levelled the machine to factory spec. It was much steeper than it should have been.. ill see how it goes.

I was just putting a few plays on it and was having a really good game which came to a sudden end after not hitting the lit extra ball on ball 3! =(

One problem I've come across is that the right ramp when shot hard. Sometimes the ball fly's out of the wire form into the upper flipper. I will put a couple of washers where the ramp mounts to raise the right hand side of it up a bit.

Hello and welcome!

This blog will mainly cover my restoration of pinball machines and all other pinball related things in my life. I will begin blogging any work i do to my games here as of today!

My homegameroom user gallery can be found here so please check it out.