Since Doctor Who's mini playfield is getting its spa day, here's the 3rd level mechanism. The 3 Daleks are flyaway targets, a relative of drop targets except they get hang off something and turn horizontally when hit. Not that common mechanism, I think Bally's Speak Easy had bunch of these.

They have a small metal flap to keep them in the "dropped" state once you whack them with a ball. There's a unified release mechanism for all 3 at the side, which is actuated by a roller just below the playfield.

The game has to take the whole mini playfield down one level to reset these, which is why after each jackpot collect it seems to go down and then back up for no apparent reason. The game doesn't know their status, there's a normal micro switch elsewhere and these are purely ornamental, you can score the jackpot even if they were all missing.

#pinball #mechanism #pinrepair #mildlyinteresting

People often diss Doctor Who's mini playfield lift mechanism, mine's pushing 26 years after the initial rebuild and I've never had any issues with that part of it.

Just below the first stage however sits a row of 5 weird looking targets. They're optical, meaning each of them has a IR LED + phototransistor pair, which gets interrupted by the target when it gets whacked by a ball. While the design is very robust, every now and then one of the LEDs gives up the ghost.

The targets are in pretty hard to reach place, which requires pulling the mini playfield out of the game and disassembling the whole front part. When this happens, it gets a full service of regreasing the rails and the gearbox.

Also seen here is my go-to trick for diagnosing optos: just look at them through a digital camera. They always seem to emit at least some visible light even with the modern phones having an IR filter.

#pinball #repair #pinrepair #retrotech

The crappy flipper buttons, don't get me started on those! Since the beginning of the time everyone used the kind where the moving part of the button was secured by an e-clip. Then something happened (early enshittification?) and a model where the center was just pushed in place surfaced. It had a small collar to prevent the center from just jumping out of the button frame, but that wore off from normal wear and tear, leaving surprised players with the flipper button center in their hands mid-game!

The Mandalorian seen here is just from the era where the good old model had made its comeback and in this case the button wasn't a total loss, the e-clip had just come off for some reason. Oh and the black ones are relatively rare, I think the Mando is the only one of mine to have those.

#pinball #repair #pinrepair

Elvira had this really weird rattle in all the menu button sounds. At first I thought it was the speaker or amp going bad but then...

#pinball #pinrepair #repair #mysterysound

Well okay.

#pinrepair

Speaking of Road Show, its DMD has seen better days. I'll probably have to look into having Pin2DMD manufactured at some point, as my last real gas discharge displays are on their way out.

#pinrepair #dmd

Contact's upper right flipper started sticking. It has worked so well that I have never needed to do anything about it. On closer examination, turns out someone had used WD40 or similar oil in the plunger, which had now gunked with pinball dust and started causing issues.

Some brake clean later it works again. RIK also got to take a look how different the Williams system 3 flipper mechanism is compared to anything else solid state.

#pinball #repair #pinrepair