Livin it One Day at A Time

Well we had over all of the young single adults for a movie night. It was fun. I cleaned for the entire day in preparation. Watched Mean Girls.

I think we shall do this again.

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This week I went and saw Brian Regan in Denver. More on that later.

So I am talking to one of my female friends for a few hours. Towards the end I asked her if she wanted to go to see the Comedian. She said yes.

After a few minutes on the Phone with Comedy Works I was sure that I was getting a Saturday @ 8:30 PM tickets. Well when I got the tickets I found that they had sold me were for Friday @ 8:30.

Well in the interm the girl I had asked informed me that she had to go to a Relief Society function.

So I had asked another girl. When I had realized that the date had changed I asked her if she could come on Friday. She said yes.

Then on Tuesday she told me that she couldn’t go. So I had to ask the first girl. The email I got from the Second girl leads me to believe that she knew I had asked the First.

Ah Girls, I just don’t understand ya!

Add to the fact that I had people asking me about it afterwards. What I thought etc.

Cheyenne truly is too small.

Well, Brian Regan rocked. We managed to get front row tickets. As I was getting into line I saw these two people right in front of me whispering up a storm. I was hearing stuff like “Where have I seen him?” “Maybe at a dance?”

These were two of Tyson’s Denver friends. So we started talking and I taught them about Comedy Club traditions.

We went and sat down up front and the MC proceeded to make fun of me as a “Coloradian”. I didn’t mind. He made fun that I was one of the “Highlands Ranch” clones. I didn’t mind. He reminded me of Hagrid a bit.

Brian rocked. He had some very funny bits and my cheeks hurt by the end. We then went to The Cheesecake Factory. My date told me that she told the girls she talks to that I was a good date. Woooo!

Overall, it was a fun time!

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Well here I sit in church

I am beat to death right now. The Corporate masters called me in last night. There was a high pay per view event going on and some of the equipment was melting down. I had to work my magic and get the equipment back up and running again.

At least it got me out of watching “Wimbleton” which looked to be a very boring chick flick. Most of the time a chick flick has to be very good for me to even think of watching it. Add to the fact that Chick Flicks cause the female species to have unrealistic viewpoints of romance.

Not that guys have that problem at *all*.

Other than that I have been building a pinball dolly with some co-workers. They have welding equipment, woodworking equipment, and silver solder. Not only that, but they want to help me! This is a pinball restorers dream! This pin dolly will be able to move a jeep.

Still trying to decide which girl I am going to seriously go after.

Girls cause me stress.

Cleaning my living space. Preping the Twilight Zone for restoration. Expect write ups on that and on the dolly.

Who knows, we may make the dollys and the cabs we are making to others.

I am also still working on my Arcade Program.

And I want that Dr. Who working!

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I am crazy like a cat

That’s why my friends call me whiskers.

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Ok, so I had a few people ask if I’d chronicle the work I’ve done on my fishtales. It’s late at night, I don’t want to write my arcade tracking prog anymore, so here goes..

1) The Arrival. After long discussion with the Op/Former owner of this pin, I have it showing up with NAVL.

The Game come on it’s legs (a big no-no) But, there is a chance that this pin would fall apart without those bolts.

This pin had also conciderable water damage to it’s head. This is not surprising as it came from Rhode Island. I probably would have bartered down on price for this pin if I knew the damage. But that’s spilt milk
2) Playfield shop: The Pin as it was had a huge piece of operator applied mylar on it. This needed to come up before I went much further. I removed the bumpbers and then went to town on the mylar. I tried a few different approaches to this, but ended up going with the upside down compressed air solution. It worked surprisingly well.

You can see the mylar in both of these photos.

Up comes the Mylar. That’s a mighty big piece..

Now, the compressed air is good for removing the mylar, but it leaves behind a nice and sticky residue. Time for Goo Gone

This Stuff takes some work to get up.

I then started to play around with some “Mr Clean” Magic Eraser I had bought. Here’s some before and after photos.

Jury is still out on this one.

Off comes the apron

I have bought a playfield rotiserrie. Thus, my days of restoring in the cab are done!

Time to continue to dissassemble the playfield. If you don’t have a digital camera you will need to take very careful notes. As it is, I just took lots of photos.

Up come the bumpers

Up come the habitrails (metal rails that the pinball rides on)

The following photos are just parts of the playfield being stripped.

Next, the boat that sits as part of the Ramp needs to come up.
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Since this playfield was filthy, and I wanted to get a good nice shine to the game, I even took off the pop bumpers (First time). When you do this, it would be wise to mark the light sockets you snip so that you know where to place them when it comes time to reassemble the playfield.

Ok, now it’s time to get out the Novus (plastics cleaner) and start applying some elbow grease to get the dirt off of this playfield. In the meantime, I took all of the plastics from the game, put them in my dishwasher (skip the drying portion of the dishwasher, or you’ll have melted plastics). The plastics came out looking all shiny and new! I also took out the back plastic so that I could get to, and replace the lights back there (#44 I believe) This game has some rust in it, so I will have to look at fixing that soon.

So now, I start smearing wax all over it.

Notice how it’s getting all nice and shiny! Now it comes time to start assembling the beast. I found that installing the metal is the easiest. These metal rails I cleaned with some Never Dull polisher. This makes the metal rails very, very shiny. Caveat, make sure the polishing compound is wiped off before you place the metal back on the playfield, or you could ruin part of the playfield.

I also cleaned the underside of the playfield. Right now, I’m just using windex, and alcohol to clean the bottom of the inserts. Bought a big pack of swabs to do this.

Oh, you need to replace the fuses on these machines pretty much accross the board. This game had fuses so rusted, old, that they fell apart in my hands.

Now it’s time to start putting the bumpers and the rubbers back onto the playfield.

Next, I re-soldered the light fixtures back in. This was complicated because I had to piece together which went where.

Ahh, slowly it comes all together.

The outside of the pin had some pretty bad gunk (read: chewing gum) on the outside, and it was just dirty. According to the Op, this pin sat in a Pizza restaurant, and I could believe it. So I took some Simple Green to it, and cleaned away. Got must off the Grime off.

As the work was winding down, it was time to rebuild the flippers. When a new game comes in, it’s wise to rebuild the flippers. These are the most trashed parts of a game, and need to be replaced regularly.

Welp, the playfield is back in one piece (minus the few screws I always have left over). Looks nice eh?

I’m not really finished with this pin though. When it shipped, the cabinet was very loose, and the bottom was coming out. Well, with the bottom coming out, that has caused ground problems, and the game won’t play most of the time. Right now I am planning on clamping the game together. Actually my plans are to

1) Get new decals for the cabinet
2) Sand off cabinet Decals
3) Put on new decals.
4) Get new insert Decals
5) Replace Insert Decals.
6) Tighten up Cabinet.

I am also in the midst of Shopping out a TZ, and a Dr. Who. I also have some friends who are helping me create a “Pinball Dolly” To move these beasts around. I’ll have more on that soon.

Please, if I’ve left something out, or made a mistake, let me know!

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Well. I managed to score a free Pentium III. Jumpgate (my firewall host) is currently running on this host! Going from a 200mhz Pentium to a 400 Mhz PIII is quite different. Hopefully the pictures load a bit faster as well. It also has a 128 mb of ram!

Well, I’m moving rooms, aching to get working on my Dr. Who, and planning on trading my Outrun Mini Cab for a Star Wars 350lbs Cabinet.

Otherwise, I’ve been going to the Farmers Market

Ah, Facasia bread, and strange goat cheeses. Is this not what the Farmers Market is about?!?

I found a interesting sticker on the way to the Market.

Whilst the roomate is off water sking, I may do some Photoshop/Gimp magic and make that some part of the page.

On to other things.. Wordpress continues to look good, but I want to blogsense this blog, as well as Use the photos I’ve set up. I just have to track down those Plugins. I kinda want to wait till it reaches 2.0, but I don’t know when that will be..

Moving to a bigger room. Hopefully I can fit the Dr. Who and BattleZone in there
On the girl front, I am reminded of the Lyrics of the J. Geils Band.

You love her
But she loves him
And he loves somebody else
You just can’t win
And so it goes
Till the day you die
This thing they call love
It’s gonna make you cry
I’ve had the blues
The reds and the pinks
One thing for sure

(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah
(Love stinks)
Love stinks yeah yeah

I have plenty of girls I like. I know of plenty of girls that like me.

If I could only get the two to intersect.

Oh, and the roomie’s family was over, and one of his female cousins was playing The Addams Family. There are girls out there that like arcade games! Woo hoo!

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Just to let you know, I’m still loosing weight, just not as fast as I want

Here’s me, oh, a year+ ago, when I organized a trip out to the Zoo and then a photo of me at Brian’s wedding.

Anyways, It’s getting late, and I gots to go to bed.

Take care ya’ll

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