And here we go again. Silence doesn't mean nothing happened, it just means I've been too lazy to update the website ;-)

The Creature underwent a complete and thorough cleanup, and it was about time! As these pictures show, you couldn't see through the ramps anymore (and that was just the top of the iceberg!), but look at the result after:

I completely dismantled the playfield, stripped naked down to the bare-bone wood, and carefully and patiently cleaned it up (thank you Mr Red Devil and GoldCat ;-).

It's been a while since I last discussed the Creature. The reason for that wasn't because there was nothing to say, it was because there was a lot going on and I wanted to wait until I've made enough progress to warrant a story :)

First things first, big news: the Creature is 100% operational, everything works. YAY! Picking up where I left off, here's in a somewhat chronological order what happened on that machine for the past few months.

Considering what we've seen before (see previous posts), two things needed immediate attention:

This afternoon was dedicated to the Creature's Power Board. After running the tests I had a bunch of nasty surprises (see the previous post on this topic), so I had to try to clean the mess.

Roughly put, since it was obvious that the problems stemmed from any of:

• Bad components
• Bad solders
• Bad tracks

It seemed logical to clean out the whole bank, remove all components so that they could be replaced with new parts, but also so that the tracks could be tested. And of course this would make room for new, clean solders.

The past 3 days have been spent removing all the previous broken by design hacks and fixing things, and running tests to identify further issues. There were surprises, good, and bad :-P

• The hologram's motor works intermittently, only when fiddling with the triac board's fuse. Looks like a dry solder, or maybe a damaged Triac board, likely considering the next item...

I had a better look at the CFTBL now, and here's the result:

There are a few missing items:

• The lockdown bar
• One ball has gone missing
• The left slingshot plastic is from another machine, a Doctor Who, see this picture:
  

Also, all the rubbers need to be replaced, the plunger knob is damaged, and the wiring needs a thorough check (there are obvious plugs mismatches, unsoldered elements, and weird shunts and other electric hacks that look really wrong)!

Here we go, second pinball collected!

I got my hands on a relatively damaged 1992 Solid-State (SS) Bally Creature From The Black Lagoon, a.k.a CFTBL. The previous owners made an (many?) attempt(s) at fixing things, but at first glance it looks like they didn't know what they were doing.