Hello, My name is Chris.

I have a hobby.

I have an addiction ;)

So, this past weekend, I went and bought myself 13 Pinball Machines. Putting my herd up to 16 Pins! But thank goodness, not for long as I will have two collectors from Utah coming up and buying 9 of the pins, and Tyson may buy one as well.

Here’s how it all went down:

Three weeks ago, I was picking up my Killer Insinct 2 and I was talking to the soon to be laid off Tech and he said “I don’t want to piece out these pins. I’ll sell these 12 for 3k.” I asked about another pin, and he threw that in as well.

But these were EM and early SS pins! I am outta my league! So I sat on it. I showed Alan the pins, I thought about dropping the price. I posted to RGP about it. I posted to the Utah Video Game Collectors list about it.

And I sat on it.

The tech was laid off.

I went in to the op’s place, and he talked to me about selling me three of the pins for 3k. Meanwhile I had a collector in Utah start emailing me and offering to buy a majority of the pins ( I had taken pictures of the pins and he saw them in my Gallery and he liked what he saw.

So after much coaching from him, I went in to the Op and said the following

Me: Your tech offered to sell me these 13 pinball machines for 3k. I have a friend, and we are willing to pay that much for all of these pins for that much. I can give you cash today for the pins.

Him: Ahh hmmm… Well this pin, it only has cosmetic problems.

Me: And this pin is missing boards

Him: Ahh hmmm.

He looks at me, looks at the pins, looks at me, looks back at the pins.

Him: Ok, I will give them to you for that price. You are getting one heck of a deal.

Me: I know.

So then, I had to go and find any money I could to complete this deal. Now I am just waiting for the two collectors to come down from Utah this Saterday to pick up their games.

So for this brief period of time, I am the owner of 16 pinball machines!

Without much further ado here they are:

• Kiss
• Pinbot
• Pinbot
• Shaq Attaq
• Spring Break
• Solar City
• Target Alpha
• Target Alpha
• Ali
• Punk Rock
• Circuis
• Strikes n Spares
• Dr. Who
  

  So now I just need to wait till Saterday, and get some more STORAGE! ;)
  

  Oh, and he has three other pins I might try to pick up (or one or two as part as a bulk buy) (Independance Day, Johnny Menomic, or Batman Returns)
  

Well, the fishtales is “almost” finished. I had a chance to strip the playfield completely.

Let me mention one thing. I always end up with extra bolts, screws and washers. Never fails!

So I put like three rounds of Novus. I finally got the playfield cleaned. A few of the ball swirl marks (caused by dirty pinballs) wouldn’t come clean. Even wit h the Magic Erasor.

Then came the four layers of wax. I put three layers of kit wax on the playfield. Got it nice and shiny. Then I put on one layer of hard caranuga TreWax. Then I buffed it to a nice shiny look. Then it was time to start putting things back on.

I will put on a few additional photos on here. Or you can just check out the gallery

I will also put up a more detailed description later.

This past few weeks have just involved me working on my Twilight Zone Pinball Machine.

I would not recommend this to a beginner. This machine is a nightmare of optos and toys.

I have been stalling as far as putting insert decals onto the playfield. They just don’t look right. This makes me nervous because it means I have to put an additional layer of varathean or send it off to Bill Roberts to clear coat the beast, which would mean I would be paying money and striping the playfield totally.

I don’t want to do that.

So I`ll watch the “This ole Pinball” videos again to see if I can get a good idea what to do.

In my recovering from the breakup with Star I induldged myself in another pinball purchase. Went to the local op/Computer center, and got a swingin deal on a Johnny Mnemonic, so I bought it. I a lso got en old EM game as well. Ah, my hobby/addiction. Take a look at the Pins or the warehouse where I picked the pin up (lots of vids). Brought Tyson along for muscle. Photos below.

Restoration of FishTales Part II

Well, I continue to work on the Fish Tales pinball machine that I got from the Op in Rhode Island. This Pin was in sad, sad shape. It had an ok playfield (with lots and lots of mylar on it), but as I watched the Delivery guys take it out of the NAVL Semi, I was shocked to see that the back box was extremly water damaged.

The sides were pretty faded as well.

So I proceeded to finish up any playfield work I could do. I added a decal that I purchased from Treasure Cove

After the decal was placed on the playfield, I let the pin sit in the game room until I found out that a coworker liked to do woodworking for his hobby. After talking/buttering him up, we took the Fish Tales to his house. Below you can see some of the damage to the cabinet. The wood where the legs were, was pretty badly ripped into. The cabinet itself had been glued, then he used long wood screws to attempt to hold the cab together. Needless to say, I tiewrapped the cab because I was afraid it would just fall apart.

Next came the task of taking it all apart. This meant taking a *LOT* of Digital Photos, so that I can hopefully put this jigsaw back together again.

First off, my coworker decided that it would be wise just to recreate the backbox (goodbye yellow stenciling on the back!). So I started the process of pulling out the circuitboards.

Now it was time to start tracking where all the ground braid was, so that I knew where to place it in the new head.

It was then time to take the Fish off of the Topper. I then spotted the damage to the fish’s tail. If any of you know how to fix the damage, or have a good condition fish, please, let me know ;) (anyone notice all the rust on this game?)

Then off went the lights out of the backbox.

Then we took off to Home Depot for some parts and some wood. Then it was time to dismantle the old backbox.

My coworker was measuring the parts, and started on the work to recreate the backbox.

Well, the work was done, and the new backbox was spraypainted. We then started to put the pieces back together to see if it would fit!

I’d like to give a big thanks to Bryan Kelly for letting me “borrow” some new ground strip, alas one day I hope to be a CARGPB someday :)
Anyways, we then put all the ground brad back into the backbox, all the electronics, and got it all looking nice and pretty for the eventually decal application (that will be part three of the restoration)

It was now time to work on the cabinet. Once again, you can *never* take to few pictures. I just spent most of the time taking the wiring/boards out. (notice how dirty it is in this cabinet.)


Now it’s time to repair the cabinet itself, rip off the old decal, and put on the new. (oh, and if you are wondering what we are taking out of the bottom of the cabinet, somehow (I’m not surprised) a wood screw got stuck inbetween the side of the cabinet and the bottom panel.

Once again, I’d like to thank all of RGP, Bryan K. and my coworker, Kurt Schlagel for helping get this pin looking like it has life in it :)

Restoration of FishTales

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.

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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.
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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.

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You can see the mylar in both of these photos.

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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

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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!