Count me in the club. I picked up my Doctor Who from an operator a little over a year ago. It was missing some boards and the DMD. By trial and error I found out that the Rottendog DMD driver board doesn't keep up with the animations. I ended up buying a different one from eBay and it has worked perfectly. Don't remember the brand, but it replaced the logic chips with an ASIC and a couple of support chips.

It gets a lot of play at The Game Preserve. I am always hearing the Daleks yelling "Exterminate!".

I started watching the Doctor in the early 70's. The PBS station in Chicago started with William Hartnell and went through them in order. I am surprised that the Whovians here have not mentioned Peter Cushing as The Doctor. Granted that they were a poorly received pair of film adaptations.

Anyway, I recently mostly finished installing the Cointaker LED kit and it looks fabulous. There are a couple of bulbs that I will have to finish off when I pull the Time Expander to swap the playfield out for the new one from CPR and the other couple of bulbs that are under all the ramps.

ken

Is there a tutorial for removing the mini-playfield? I have the manual page, but it looks like there is a real possibility of damaging something if it is done wrong. I scanned this forum but did not see any posts about the right way of removing it.

Mine just started not raising all the way up and I think I need to pull it and re-grease the gearbox on the motor to restore some muscle. While I have it apart, I will probably replace the mini-playfield with the CPR repro I bought just after I bought the DW, as well as test the optos and any other maintenance you guys can suggest. I'd rather do this right one time, the first time.

ken

Thanks.

I realized I hadn't tried to look in the tech section and found a link to https://sites.google.com/site/pinballfaz/ in a question about replacing the motor. I think it is the same document. The above link is to the original author's site.

That will teach me to think I had looked everywhere.

ken

Thanks for putting out such a detailed document. I haven't had a chance to start pulling mine apart, yet. But having a detailed document (as opposed to the one page drawing with one paragraph of text in the manual) is a big confidence booster. I always worry when I get done and there are 3 parts left over, but with the big pictures and step by step directions I hope to have 0 extra parts left over.

ken

Update on the mini playfield issues. Over the holidays, I pulled the mini playfield. Pulled the motor gearbox apart to re-grease it. It turned out one of the gears is spinning freely. So I ended up buying a new motor . If you can pull the mini playfield up or down by hand, you probably have a stripped gear as well.

While I had it apart, I checked all the optos (and replaced about half of them) so all the grey bumper buttons work now.

I also dropped in the CPR mini playfield and the rest of the LED bulbs.

Putting it back together was an exercise in manual dexterity (where is that 3rd hand evolution keeps promising us), but it was completed successfully. And it looks great. Now I just have to find a set of the Cliffy's for it to keep it looking nice.

The one issue I had putting it back together was the roller got twisted when I tightened the nuts down and I didn't see it. This caused the mini playfield to bind up when it was retracted. Fortunately the fix was as simple as loosening the nuts then holding the roller where it should be while I tightened the nuts back down. The 3rd hand would have been really handy again, but two hands did manage.

Thanks again to everybody who gave suggestions and Faz for his great document.

ken