Mon, 02 May 2005
On the 18'th of last month (it's May now, it was April then) we had Alex Bik (from Bit) come over and have a look at the 'Swords of Fury' pinball machine that we had standing here at the office.
Despite the fact that several parts were missing or missing... or both, he managed to get the thing running again in a nearly perfect way, too!. One of the 11-segment VFD's was defective, a fuse had blown in a most exebitionistic way for no apparent reason; several parts had cracks in them (cracks... not crack), and generally the device was as dirty as a subway toilet in places.
We spent a fun-filled evening , fueled on pizza's, getting the thing taken apart, cleaned and re-assembled again. With a 'bit of glue', 'some dabs of solder', 'a shitload of rubber-bands' and all manner of other bits of 'odds and ends', it's now running again; it works like a charm!
Sadly, or luckily, however it seems that several 'quirks' now work a liiiitle bit differently than some of the pinball-wizards here were used to. This gives them an excuse to blame their 'lack of practice' on the 'weirdness of the machine, instead. The same effect allows us 'pinball-noobs' to have _some_ hope of actually beating the pro's on this '(good as) new' machine. Benefits for all! Perhaps I'll manage to pry a few pictures from the camera used that day to document 'where everything was before we unscrewed it'. Perhaps non-surprising is that we really needed it a few times.... damned there's a lot of analog-mechanic-stuff in there... Evil!