Neil
Your machine is perfectly safe sir, I apologise for not replying to your emails as quickly as I'd like of late.
Unfortunately we took in a very large order a number of months ago to restore a lot of machines, this was supposed to be spread across many months, however, the timescale became truncated due to their own clients demand so we have been working literally every hour of the day and night trying to keep up which has put us severely behind on other repairs. Myself and my team are physically drained by the time I go home around 9pm and sadly some emails inevitably get missed.
I took in 3 staff to assist but one has had to have some time off of late with personal issues of his own, he works on the physical side doing cabinet restorations so if one person is off I have to drop what I'm doing and go work in that area as we can't afford 10-15 people just yet.
There are jobs I can train people to do and jobs that I can't - board and monitor repairs sadly still fall on my desk for the time being.
Big Phil was at my unit a few weeks ago and can vouch for the dedication put into trying to circumvent some problems that occur - he brought me a Battlezone board to repair which getting it to start up and display a screen was the easy part, however, when we got it to that stage, the vector display was completely out of whack, I also spent the following day entirely on this problem of trying to resolve the problem and got about half way to a resolution.
We recently did an OutRun restoration for Chris on here who although it took a while longer than anticipated due to artwork acquisition from the original request I believe he is extremely happy.
You left a voicemail yesterday (Saturday 18/11), for my own sanity I don't answer the phone Saturday's and Sunday's even though I'm in the unit some of those days. We made several decisions for the business and one of them was not to be forced to work weekends. Phonecalls often take longer than the job itself as I can attest to with many many calls per day. This is also why I do not give my mobile number to anybody anymore, if anyone who has it was to pass it out, I'd change it. I have to keep a work and personal life balance like everyone else doing a job.
I'm still a collector and enthusiast at heart, the bulk of what I do is to provide a roof over the head of my collection and to be able to share those with 20,000+ people at shows like Play Expo.
You asked us to do a number of jobs on your Robotron cocktail which have been part completed but I've had to shelve all repairs until I can get this last batch of work for this customer out of the door by next weekend.
I will update you privately of course but I wanted to comment on the forum in response to your enquiry.
Again, apologies for lack of response, we will get your machine sorted and back to you asap.
James
