Starting in mid-July of 2021 and ending in April of 2022 I rebuilt and restored an Addams Family that was in a fire at Davey’s Uptown Rambler’s Club in March 2020. The TLDR is I ended up with one basically new Addams Family (TAF) and my original Addams Family.
Continue readingUpdated June 17, 2020
After 8 years I’ve decided it is time for me to hang up my operator keys. Don’t despair, this doesn’t mean pinball is leaving Pizza West, Knub’s Pub. Nick Greenup of Solid State Pinball Supply with help from Keri Wing will be taking over these two locations. Outfield Beer Company in Edwardsville no longer has pinball machines on location.
Continue readingIt is over. I originally posted this on December 19, 2015 and I’ve kept it up to date since then. But the torch has been passed and the games are no longer my responsibility.
I thought it would be fun to look back at the games I’ve run through Pizza West since June 2012. Games that won’t be back are noted with a † (dagger). In chronological order:
I haven’t written a repair oriented post in quite a while. I figured I’d better document this one while it was still fresh in my mind.
The problem was a Stern CPU board out of a Spiderman that was draining the battery quickly. This era of board is Stern’s SAM system that was used from Pirates of the Caribbean until Wrestlemania, which was the debut of the Spike system.
A quickly draining battery usually involves the board’s clock or RAM. These are what the battery supplies power to when the game is powered off. The area we’re interested in is this section of the CPU board schematics:
We lost a great guy Saturday, July 16th. The KC Star has a nice write up about Daniel Marez. He will be greatly missed.
The next monthly tournament at Pizza West will be a memorial fundraiser for Daniel’s family.
I typed the following on a forum post and figured I may as well throw it up here. It is just some of my thoughts on using original circuit boards vs. buying new:
Some people want things original. There’s nothing wrong with running the old boards. One person may not like it, one may prefer it. I’ve certainly seen a fair amount of problems with brand new stuff. And often a new board doesn’t solve the problem because the actual issue is something else. I’ve seen new boards damaged because the original problem was not correctly repaired. In the end a new board didn’t save the owner any time or money.
An update on Doctor Who that was mentioned previously.
I picked up a basket case Doctor Who in October of 2013. I had a lot of other things that had to get done before I could work on it, so I folded it up and stuck it in the garage. Today I got it back out, it is time to get it working.
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I decided to save parts from the repairs I performed this year. Above is an overview of the pile from 2013. Continue reading
I went to Disney World right after the New Year and found a few pinball machines. I didn’t go out of my way to look for games, but here’s some information on what I did find.