TechFest 5 was held in San Diego, California - The heart of Indian Gaming country in Southern California and home to Slot Tech Magazine. TechFest 5 included a special instructional series on video slot monitor repair and power supply repair presented by Randy Fromm.
 

Left: Mark Roberts is from 3M Touchsystems. He gave us a rundown on their popular touchscreen and showed us some excellent diagnostic software for their product.

Cliff Curley, Bench Technician for the Coeur D'Alene Casino in Worley, Idaho, took advantage of San Diego's unbelieveable winter weather of 75 - 80 degrees to get in 18 holes. Slot Tech Magazine secured a special rate for full use of the facilities. Since his casino doesn't have coin hoppers, he was able to skip lunch, skip the hopper presentation and still make it back to learn about power supplies. A full day for sure. How'd he shoot? 

"Lousy," said Cliff.
 

Gloria Vega works for the Paradise Casino in Yuma Arizona. A professional career woman her entire adult life, she enjoys the equal footing between men and women in the casino business.

2-10-3     “LEE’S WORLD”

  Dear Mom,

 As I wrote you last week I went down to the San Diego area to attend the TechFest training put on by Randy Fromm. It was held at a real nice place called the Barona Valley Ranch Resort and Casino.

The rooms were first class. I stayed on the 7th floor with a view of their golf course. It was a huge room with 2 large queen beds and you should have seen the bathroom. It had a separate tube and shower that was surrounded with see-through glass. They had those fancy soap bars that smelled like the Avon Lady that goes to our church and bars of soap that claimed to have oatmeal in them.

Every day there was a maid that came in and cleaned up the place and left all kinds of fancy bottles of stuff on the counter. There was some sort of hair stuff and flower smelling shampoo. There was hand lotion and there was this bottle of green blue stuff that if you soaked your teeth in it over night would really make them smell good.

The classes were a lot of fun and I learned a bunch of stuff too. Randy taught us 40 plus techs about how monitors work. He showed us how all the little parts work together to make the nice picture on the screen called a CRT. Once we got the hang of all that he showed us how to fix the bad parts and get the down monitors working again.

I helped him out from time to time During the 3 day class. I was able to create a few extra problems with the good monitors we used for testing. I really didn’t mean to mess up so many but the one that caught on fire was not my fault and I told him as much. 

Randy had other folks there to teach us about Touch Screens, BAs, Printers, and Hoppers. I got a lot of How-to-Books and phone numbers of folks to call if I ever got stumped with a fix-it problem.

I got to meet many other techs too from all over the US. There were a couple of them that were a little nerdy. You know the type, talked about Trons, Step-Down-Resistors, and Bi-Polar Wiring. But within a day or two they were able to fix things just as good as the rest of us.

The last day Randy made us fix all the stuff that got broke and he called me up in front of the class and personally thanked me for all the first hand training I single handedly provided for the class. 

I really learned a lot of neat fix-it tricks and now have my very own pocket screwdriver and flashlight. The best part of the hole thing was when I got back to work I was able to get all the down games up and have started to repair all the bad components that have been piling up around the tech room.

Randy told us he also taught a more in depth 2-week class {instead of the 3-day class}. I can hardly wait to get to that one. 
 There is just too much to tell you in one setting but will tell you more next week. I sure hope you enjoy the bar of stinky soap {enclosed} and just dump out the bottle of the blue green stuff in your teeth bucket and let me know what you think. Well, I had better get going.

Loves,
       Lee