Time to wrap things up on Dr Who! First thing for this update is to clean up the two ramps, so I’ll start with the smaller one. The ramp has protection at its entrance which has prevented any damage over the years. The decals are pealing a bit along the side, but the ramp is otherwise in great condition (if you look past the filth).
The large ramp is also in great condition. Just like with the small ramp, protection at the entrance has prevented any damage and the decal along the back is pealing and will need to be stuck down.
Both ramps were disassembled and cleaned. The small metal pieces were put through the tumbler for cleaning. All plastic pieces were cleaned with Nifti and then polished with Novus. The pealing decals were stuck back down with some craft glue. Both ramps were now looking much cleaner.
Before getting the ramps back on I painted the inside panels of the cabinet with a fresh layer of gloss black. It doesn’t take much effort and gives excellent results with the cleaned up game.
The headbox also was given a fresh coat of gloss black with some small damage spots patched up.
Looking back at where the game started, it was filthy and also unplayable with flipper, coil and lamp issues. So much dust.
Now, Dr Who has been given a new lease on life and has come up looking great!
With the game back together I was able to put the game through its paces with some testing. Two issues showed themselves during play. The first was an extra ball being served up on occasions. The problem with this sort of issue is it only happened on a couple of occasions, making it hard to track down. Finally it started happening almost every ball – now I had something to work with. The issue was the assembly used to serve the ball up. The arm would fire up, serve the ball into the shooter lane and then become stuck, preventing the other 2 balls in the trough from moving forward.
After a few seconds it would eventually pull back down. During that time though the game would fire the ball into play automatically and then serve up a second ball. There was a cable under the playfield that the arm was getting stuck on. Clearing the out of the way resolved the issue. The arm now had free movement and no longer got stuck. No more second ball and issue solved.
The last issue that showed up during testing was with the small ramp on right. There were two situations where the ball could get stuck (if travelling at a slow speed). When installing the ramp again, I noticed that the metal spacer it connects to seemed a little high. After some ramp adjustments I was able to eliminate one of the stuck spots, but the other remained. On further investigation I became convinced the spacer used to support the ramp was a bit too tall as it was pushing the ramp up towards the end in an awkward shape. Installing a slightly shorter metal spacer eliminated the problem entirely. Both are shown in the photo and there is about a 7 – 8mm difference between them.
That’s it for Dr Who. Once those final issues with the ramp and ball serve are were sorted, the game has held up really well. The owner was kind enough to let me keep the game for a couple of weeks once work was complete, so I’ve posted up a few nice scores for him to beat. Dr Who is a fantastic game to play and has the ‘just one more go’ factor which keeps you going back for more. I absolutely love the W-H-O 3 shot combo! This machine is in really nice condition and will look great in his line up. No time to rest though, more machines in the queue to look at – so stay tuned 🙂