# Live Turner Pinball Tour! **Source:** Cary Hardy YouTube Live Streams **Type:** video **Published:** 2025-08-26 **Duration:** 15m 25s **Beat:** Pinball **URL:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ovTCjI7rjM --- ## Analysis Carrie Hardy tours Turner Pinball's manufacturing facility, showcasing Merlin's Arcade machines nearing shipment. Chris Turner demonstrates an innovative pop bumper design with patent-pending improvements for easier installation, durability, and LED integration. Turner discusses production progress (units 3-10 ready to ship), upcoming software updates for Ninja Eclipse, and plans to attend Chicago Expo but remains undecided on Houston Expo. ### Key Claims - [HIGH] Merlin's Arcade units 3-10 are ready to ship, with plan to reach 4-6 units per week production after initial batch — _Chris Turner directly states units are ready for final testing and boxing, with initial shipment planned for Wednesday or Thursday pending staff availability_ - [HIGH] Turner Pinball has developed a patent-pending pop bumper design that requires no calibration and simplifies LED installation — _Chris Turner demonstrates the new design with three modified parts that maintain compatibility with standard pop bumpers while eliminating tuning time and simplifying wiring_ - [HIGH] Ninja Eclipse software update is ready for release in beta and will be rolled out widely very soon — _Chris Turner states beta was released to several customers and wide release coming shortly_ - [HIGH] Turner Pinball committed to Chicago Expo with booth and hotel already booked, but Houston Expo attendance remains undecided — _Chris Turner confirms Chicago Expo booking and states Houston attendance is uncertain due to tight scheduling (approximately one week apart)_ - [HIGH] Significant design changes were made to Merlin's Arcade since Texas Pinball Festival playtest — _Carrie Hardy notes at opening that Chris Turner showed multiple changes since TPF, specifically highlighting the pop bumper design innovation_ ### Notable Quotes > "...he was showing me the changes and he's like you notice anything different and I was like and I didn't catch it at first and then he was like look at the pop bumpers and I was like holy snap" > — **Carrie Hardy**, Opening segment > _Establishes the pop bumper design as the major surprise/innovation of Merlin's Arcade since TPF_ > "There's no calibration required, which I don't know how the other pinball companies do it, but every game that goes out the door, we would actually work on getting that spoon in just the right spot to make sure the pop bumper was working well. That takes a lot of time, and these you just don't have to do that." > — **Chris Turner**, Pop bumper technical explanation > _Highlights the practical manufacturing advantage of the new design—eliminating time-consuming calibration that competitors still require_ > "We've got them ready to go out and lots of updates to talk about in the software and some improvements to the play field as well." > — **Chris Turner**, Tour conclusion > _Confirms multiple ongoing improvements beyond pop bumpers_ > "I mean, I think the main new thing is that now Merlin's is on the line, We got them ready to go out and lots of updates to talk about in the software and some improvements to the play field as well." > — **Chris Turner**, Tour wrap-up > _Summarizes production readiness and scope of changes_ > "And so for putting four pop bumpers on every game and having them tuned perfectly, this was the best way for us to do it that we could find." > — **Chris Turner**, Pop bumper design rationale > _Explains design motivation: Merlin's Arcade features four pop bumpers, necessitating innovation to avoid installation nightmare_ ### Entities | Name | Type | Context | |------|------|---------| | Carrie Hardy | person | Pinball content creator hosting the tour at Turner Pinball facility, conducting interview and gameplay | | Chris Turner | person | Owner/founder of Turner Pinball, demonstrating manufacturing facility and explaining innovations in Merlin's Arcade | | Turner Pinball | company | Boutique pinball manufacturer based in San Antonio/Boerne area, producing Ninja Eclipse and Merlin's Arcade | | Merlin's Arcade | game | Second game from Turner Pinball, currently in final manufacturing stages with units 3-10 ready for shipment | | Ninja Eclipse | game | First game from Turner Pinball, receiving software update ready for release | | Texas Pinball Festival | event | Pinball exhibition where Merlin's Arcade was playable and where changes have been made since that showing | | Chicago Expo | event | Pinball industry exposition that Turner Pinball has committed to attending with booth and hotel already booked | | Houston Expo | event | Pinball exposition scheduled approximately one week after Chicago Expo; Turner Pinball attendance still undecided | | Pinball Life | company | Supplier of standard pop bumper components used in Turner's retrofittable design | ### Topics - **Primary:** Pop bumper design innovation, Merlin's Arcade production and shipment timeline - **Secondary:** Manufacturing process and assembly bay operations, Ninja Eclipse software updates, Expo attendance and industry events, Patent-pending technical innovations - **Mentioned:** Playfield design improvements since Texas Pinball Festival ### Sentiment **Positive** (0.85) — Turner Pinball demonstrates confidence in product readiness and technical innovation. Carrie Hardy expresses enthusiasm about the pop bumper design and manufacturing facility. No criticism or negative sentiment detected. Tone is professional and enthusiastic about product launch and technical achievement. ### Signals - **[design_philosophy]** Turner Pinball prioritizing installation ease, maintenance simplicity, and manufacturing efficiency alongside gameplay features through hardware innovations like retrofittable pop bumper design (confidence: high) — Chris Turner explicitly states they don't like pop bumpers from installation perspective and designed solution to make installation easier to maintain and manufacture while preserving gameplay benefits - **[event_signal]** Turner Pinball committed to Chicago Expo booth/accommodation, but Houston Expo attendance uncertain due to scheduling constraints one week apart (confidence: high) — Chris Turner confirms Chicago Expo bookings but states Houston decision not yet finalized, mentions possibility of sending team member rather than full presence - **[market_signal]** Software update for Ninja Eclipse in advanced beta stage with imminent wide release, indicating continued post-launch support and improvement cycle (confidence: high) — Chris Turner states beta released to several customers and wide release coming 'very shortly' - **[announcement]** Merlin's Arcade units 3-10 ready for shipment with initial fulfillment planned for late summer, scaling to 4-6 units per week production (confidence: high) — Chris Turner confirms units ready for final testing and boxing, with shipment target Wednesday/Thursday pending staff return from illness - **[product_strategy]** Turner Pinball developed patent-pending pop bumper retrofit design eliminating calibration requirements, simplifying LED installation, and improving durability compared to standard pop bumpers used by other manufacturers (confidence: high) — Chris Turner demonstrates three-part modification (spring steel skirt, metal base plate, internal connector piece) that maintains compatibility with standard pop bumpers while providing manufacturing and maintenance advantages - **[technology_signal]** Turner Pinball implementing manufacturing process improvements including pre-assembly optimization and streamlined pop bumper installation reducing labor and improving quality control (confidence: high) — Chris Turner describes elimination of calibration, center-routed LED wiring, and studded base plate design reducing splinter damage and removal difficulties --- ## Transcript Hopefully, we're on the Wi-Fi here at Turner Pinball, and we're going to be doing a tour of his building here. Showing off the Merlin's arcades that are currently being built. He has made a lot of changes to the game since people played it at Texas Pinball Festival. and one of them I'm it's a definitely pretty interesting especially when it comes to those of us out there that have put pinball machines together particularly in the pop bumper region is that he was showing me the changes and he's like you notice anything different and I was like and I didn't catch it at first and then he was like look at the pop bumpers and I was like holy snap and So he was walking me through basically how it works, and we're going to be going over that as well. And I think you guys might find it pretty interesting, the types of changes in what he's doing to pinball. What's going on, guys? Hey, Jason. Hopefully we have no problems with chat like we were having yesterday. I don't know what was going on there. I've never had it to where it doesn't want to show chat, but so far so good. It looks like it shows up. Live chats. All messages are visible. Yeah, let's keep it like that. I would like it to where all the messages that are up are constantly up. Because, see, they disappear over time. And it's like, man, why don't they just stay up? We'll get a few more people in here. I think Chris is over there getting things set up and everything. Yeah, we're doing this tour live. Last time it was pre-recorded. Chat one, two, chat one, two. How many Merlins? There he is right there. He's here. What's up? What was that, Chad? Let's see here. What was it saying? I'll go back. I'm sorry. Let's see here. Man, I want the chats to always be up. They come up for like a couple of seconds and then they fade away. He had a question right there. How many Merlins have been sold? I can't imagine him unloading all 500. We're starting out with a banger right there. Oh, man. All right. So, guys, we're just going to get the show on the road. Like I said, this will be a live tour. And then same thing as barrels yesterday. after 10 or 15 minutes or whatever, I'll do a live Q&A. And that's when you can hit them with all the hard-hitting, pressing questions and everything that you have for them right there. So let's get the camera turned around and get this show on the road. All right. Hey, how's it going, guys? So welcome back to the shop. So you were here, what was it, like a year ago? November of last year. Was it November last year? I think it was somewhere around November. Okay. I think it was right after TPF. okay or after expo but uh yeah here we are almost a year later and uh we've got merlin's arcade ready to go out the door so kind of we've got one of the games that was at tpf over there we'll play that here in a little bit um we've got let me walk over here i gotta show people what else you got as well hold on he's got one it's a beautiful game unfortunately it's not working very well but who Who would have thought? It doesn't work. But yeah, he's got the Merlin's Arcade right there. All right, and this is his little collection right here. Yeah. We've been doing a lot of software updates for Ninja Eclipse and testing those. Kerry, I'll share some of those with you after we go through all this. But some exciting stuff. So all the customers of Ninja Eclipse, we've got a software update that's basically ready for release. I released the beta to several of the customers and we release that widely here very shortly And then some more stuff coming up very soon And again, this is our assembly bay. And so we've got a bunch of Merlin's playfields in progress here. And then if we come to the far side here, where we do all our cabinet assembly and kind of final testing, we've got a bunch of Merlins that are ready to go out the door. We just need to finish testing and get them boxed up. Unfortunately, this week we've had two people out sick. One confirmed COVID and the other probably. So anyway, as soon as they're back, these are going in boxes. But these are the first shipments out. So we brought this game to TPF and everyone got to play it. We started taking orders then and we said we'd be shipping in summer. I'm glad I was kind of vague with the time frame right there at the end of summer we are kind of getting towards the end of summer so we got number 7 right here number 8 right there yeah this is 3 through 8 and we've got 9 and 10 and then a couple more cabinets over there yeah then after this we'll be between 4 and 6 a week once we get these out so kind of got everything streamlined now. A lot of the pre-assembly of the mechs and everything is done. Alright, so when do you expect these to be going out the door? The plan was Wednesday. If Collier comes in tomorrow, it will be Thursday. It is the day when he gets back. Basically, we need another day. Alright, I want the people to see the pop bumper. Oh yeah, so I guess we can go over to one of these games here. So Carrie and I were talking about this a little bit earlier, I was showing him one of the new features that we've come up with and it's a new design, I should say an updated design, for retrofitting an existing pop pumper to make it more durable, easier to install, and also easier to illuminate. And so you can see we've got, This is a spring steel skirt, and then we have a metal base plate, and we actually can detect the ball by either the ball bridging between the plate and the skirt, or between the skirt and the part that hits the ball, that little ring, or the skirt touching the base there. And so this is another kind of one of the things that we've tried to improve. And we've got a patent pending on this design, but there's only a few parts that are different between this pop bumper and a standard pop bumper. And so a standard pop bumper will fit on any of these games and work just the same, or you can swap out these three parts that we use that are unique and retrofit the existing pop bumper to be this design, which is great for installation. It makes the install much easier. The greatest thing about the install is that there's no calibration required, which I don't know how the other pinball companies do it, but every game that goes out the door, we would actually work on getting that spoon in just the right spot to make sure the pop bumper was working well. That takes a lot of time, and these you just don't have to do that, and they work great. And running the wire is also very difficult. You would have to feed wires through the housing of the pop bumper on the sides and then crimp your connectors and then put the LED together after that all done Here we can just slide the wire right through the center so we don have to deal with all that crimping with the pop bumper You want to show them the actual pop bumper Yeah, sure. We can show them to get a little more close and personal here. I'll show one on the rotisserie so they see what the base plate looks like. Someone asked, you know, what if a loose screw gets underneath the new metal skirt? Well, I would assume that would short the connection and you'd have an activated switch all the time. Yeah, that's true. If there was a screw that got between there. You know, and really, even a normal pop bumper skirt, if you've got a screw under it... It's not going to work. It's either not going to work or it might trigger the switch. So that would be an indication of a problem. But it wouldn't be high voltage or anything. I think it's more and more, yeah, yeah. It's just a switch that would just always be activated kind of thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, our switches aren't high voltage. Yeah, so this plate, if we just wanted to mount a standard pop bumper on here, you could just do it. It's the same exact footprint for a standard pop bumper. But this plate, you can come around to the other side, Carrie. I'll just tilt this just a little bit. It has those studs that come through. And so normally you'd be hammering those spiral shank screws through the play field. And, I mean, those are kind of a pain to work with. And, you know, sometimes it'll splinter the wood. And, you know, if you ever had to remove that or something, you're going to damage something. But these, you just slide it through, and then the standard pop bumper mech will go on to the bottom there. It's the same exact thing, except we don't have to hammer those through. And then you saw these. This is the other components. So this is the standard pop bumper components, the plastic piece that goes down first and then the top piece. And we just have our skirt in the middle there. and then there's another piece that goes on the inside that comes down through that bridges the connection to that. So this white wire is electrically connected to that skirt, which can still pivot. And then this goes to the pop bumper housing, and this is just a standard pop bumper from Pinball Life. We just take and we put the skirt in a box, and then we put our skirt on, and then we put all this in. and you'll also see that little black piece that is the one of the other pieces that we make and it just goes into the standard housing but there's a hole through it and so we can just run our wire for our led straight through the middle as opposed to going through that little hole and then having to crimp our wires and with four pop bumpers on this game well first we like pop bumpers from a gameplay perspective but we really don't like them from an install perspective And so, again, we're trying to make this easier to maintain, easier to manufacture. And so for putting four pop bumpers on every game and having them tuned perfectly, this was the best way for us to do it that we could find. And so, yeah, that's kind of one of the neat new things on Merlin's. Someone was asking, like, what about over time dust and coil dust and how does that? I mean, that was one of the questions I had was basically longevity. so i i mean i guess time will tell on this but the coil dust generally stays below the playfield we don't get a lot of that above the playfield um i guess it would probably take an awful lot of dust to gather on that to actually inhibit the connection but i would imagine with normal cleaning of your playfield and just kind of maintaining your game like if you start getting a bunch of dust building up on playfield or anything or the balls are dirty you know you You just gotta keep your game clean anyway. And so I think through the process of just doing the normal things you have to do to maintain your game, I think that you won't have any issues with these. And like you said, I think there's basically two or three different points of connection, like the actual base plate and the actual pull rod and then you have the actual skirt to complete the connection kind of thing Yeah there three paths to complete the staircase The ball also is part of that circuit kind of thing too Yep But, and again, if you wanted to, you could just put the skirt in. I mean, we've got all the space for the standard spoon, because when we went to TPF, this game had standard pop bumpers on it. and so all we did was switch out our skirt and the rest is standard components and we had this little spoon plugged into our switch for that and it it works just the same except it takes it's harder to install it's harder to run the lights i did all that running the lights and everything and i had to crimp all those things it's a huge pain and so uh yeah and what if one of those wires go bad like you would have to cut off the little connector on the end pull it through feed new wires up and crimp them and if you see these connectors like the little pins on those things they're not fun to crimp and so uh anyway it's just uh it makes it a lot easier and i think it's going to be much more durable and lower maintenance than a standard pop bumper but as i said the great thing is the parts are interchangeable and so you know let's say that someone didn't like it for some reason they can just put a normal pop bumper on it work the same and like one of my questions when i saw it also is the fact that it's easily installed in this because of the style of playfield that they have they have the layer you know right here which basically counters for the depth that it would need to have. So something like this, how it's routed out right here, that's in place for the pump bumpers. So it wouldn't be, I guess, retro-usable in the older games kind of thing unless you had a different kind of method on these plates. Yeah, we have a different method that we have for retrofit potentially. But anyway, we're working on this for new games right now. And if someone were to release a new game with this and wanted to use our Poplumber style, all they'd have to do is route that plate into the plate field, just like they would do for a scoop protector or a ramp entrance or anything else. All right. Is that pretty much the tour out there or anything else? Yeah, it's kind of a brief tour. You saw the whole shop the first time. I mean, I think the main new thing is that now Merlin's is on the line, We got them ready to go out and lots of updates to talk about in the software and some improvements to the play field as well. And so we can maybe get some game time on Merlin's and answer questions. Yeah, definitely get to play some more Merlin. So here in a little bit, guys, I will be starting up another live for you guys to ask all the questions you want to in regards to Merlin's Arcade, those pop bumpers, whatever. and so we're already getting asked are you coming to Houston Expo I don't know yet we are going to Chicago Expo I've already got the booth and hotel and all that stuff booked for that but I have not made plans for Houston and they're normally really close together so it's challenging yeah like a week apart it's possible that I could get one of the guys on the team to just take a Merlin's over there like not not have a huge presence but at least have a game over there, but I haven't made any final decisions on it yet. Alright. Like I said, guys, here in about 10 or 15 minutes or whatever, I guess during that time, if you want to check out the teaser trailer that just dropped from Stern for their new Star Wars machine, then I guess head over there to YouTube and check that out. In the meantime, I will catch y'all here in a little bit. Bye. _(Acquisition: youtube_groq_whisper, Enrichment: v3)_ --- *Exported from Journalist Tool on 2026-04-13 | Item ID: f98345c1-26fb-44a1-88a5-373d96ef0dfc*