Journalist Tool

Kineticist

  • HDashboard
  • IItems
  • ↓Ingest
  • SSources
  • KBeats
  • BBriefs
  • RIntel
  • QSearch
  • NName Review
  • +Health

v0.1.0

← Back to items

Mike Patzke and Vince Patzke - Pinball Expo 2023 - Pinball News

Pinball News (Pinball Expo 2023)·video·36m 42s·analyzed·Oct 20, 2023
View original
Export .md

Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Motor supplier reveals Stern as #1 customer, discusses 70-year pinball history and motor technology evolution.

Summary

Mike Patzke and Vince Patzke, representatives of a major pinball motor manufacturer, discuss their company's 70+ year history supplying motors to pinball and arcade manufacturers. They cover technical evolution from electromechanical to solid-state eras, highlight Stern Pinball becoming their #1 customer due to Jurassic Park Anniversary production demands, and detail their shift away from direct repair services to working through intermediaries like Steve Young and distributors like Marco Specialties. Key engineering stories include solving Jurassic Park T-Rex motor issues and developing oscillator motors used across Williams/Bally games.

Key Claims

  • Stern Pinball is now the company's #1 customer as of the morning of Pinball Expo 2023, having risen from approximately #10-12 for many years

    high confidence · Mike Patzke stated this during the Expo 2023 presentation; attributed to increased Jurassic Park Anniversary shaker motor orders

  • Stern ordered approximately 5,000 shaker motors for Jurassic Park Anniversary by the end of the month

    high confidence · Mike Patzke: 'they're just going through those like crazy and just buying motors for all their different use... we shipped 5,000 of those by the end of the month'

  • The company manufactures 150,000-175,000 motors per year

    high confidence · Mike Patzke stated this production volume during discussion of why they shifted repair strategy

  • Taiwan motor sourcing costs have increased approximately 4x over the past 10 years due to Taiwan-China relations

    high confidence · Mike Patzke: 'that X now, because of straight Taiwan and China relations, that X is like four times what it was just 10 years ago'

  • Jurassic Park originally had a left-right motor issue during development, which was fixed by repositioning switches and lengthening the slot

    high confidence · Mike Patzke recounted Gary Stern calling them to fix motor issues; the actual problem was the slot being too short, causing the motor to coast and damage the pinion drive

  • The company produces approximately 20 vacuum cleaner DC brush motors per year, of which about one-third are converted to shaker motors

    high confidence · Mike Patzke: 'we buy about 20 a year And about a third of them make it into shaker motors'

  • Brush life on average for their DC motors is about 2,000 hours depending on usage

    high confidence · Mike Patzke answering audience question about brush life specifications

  • The company has never hired employees from the pinball industry, being located about an hour north of Milwaukee in Racine, Wisconsin

    high confidence · Mike Patzke: 'we've never hired from the industry. We're far enough away. We're an hour north in Racine, Wisconsin'

Notable Quotes

  • “Gary Stern called. They were just ready to release the movie, Jurassic Park. He had seen an early preview, called us all in there, and we're having problems with this, this, and this... I want a pinball machine in every theater across the country so it's there and ready to go, and I don't want any problems.”

    Mike Patzke@ 1:25 — Illustrates the pressure and urgency from Stern during major movie licensing launches in the 1990s

  • “I checked it this morning, Stern Pinball is our number one customer right now. Wow, they jumped up the list. They are. Yeah, they have been hovering for many years, around 10, 12. But this past year, they've just gone to five. And then today, this morning, they are our number one customer so far this year.”

    Mike Patzke@ 14:46 — Major business milestone for Stern, indicating significant production scale-up, particularly for Jurassic Park Anniversary

  • “We make about 150,000 to 175,000 motors a year. So doing one here, one over there, it gets a little, drags us down.”

    Mike Patzke@ 11:52 — Explains why the company shifted from direct repairs to working through intermediaries

  • “I don't want to become competitors with our own customer. So like with Stern, we'll tell everybody go back to Stern unless Stern says otherwise or Stern is now working with Marco to distribute their product.”

    Mike Patzke@ 12:05 — Shows distribution strategy and respect for manufacturer relationships

  • “That X now, because of straight Taiwan and China relations, that X is like four times what it was just 10 years ago. And I can't, if I add on my profit margin, they're just becoming unaffordable to Stern. So now they're starting to come back to us and buy the motors that are my gearbox.”

    Mike Patzke@ 16:02 — Reveals geopolitical trade tensions driving reshoring of motor manufacturing back to the US

Entities

Mike PatzkepersonVince PatzkepersonStern PinballcompanyJurassic Park AnniversaryproductMarco SpecialtiescompanySteve YoungpersonGary SternpersonJersey Jack Pinballcompany

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Motor supplier shifted from direct repair services to working through intermediary technicians (Steve Young) and distributors (Marco, Pinball Life) to manage operational capacity

    high · Mike Patzke explained the company produces 150,000-175,000 motors annually and became backlogged with repairs; now routes repairs through Steve Young to avoid competing with manufacturer customers

  • ?

    business_signal: Stern Pinball has risen from approximately #10-12 ranking to become the motor supplier's #1 customer, driven primarily by Jurassic Park Anniversary production demands

    high · Mike Patzke stated 'Stern Pinball is our number one customer right now... this morning they are our number one customer so far this year' after years hovering around #10-12; attributed to Jurassic Park Anniversary shaker motor orders

  • ?

    event_signal: Pinball Expo 2023 panel featuring motor manufacturer representatives discussing 70+ year pinball industry history and technical evolution

    high · Mike and Vince Patzke presented at Pinball Expo 2023, discussing company history, technical documentation, and customer relationships with Stern and other manufacturers

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Historical motor design philosophy involved direct collaboration between manufacturer engineers and pinball designers requesting custom specifications in person at trade shows and facilities

    high · Mike Patzke contrasted past intimate engineer relationships ('somebody would catch me and go hey I got an idea') with current SolidWorks-based remote design process

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Motor supplier now manufacturing own gear blanks using powder metal production instead of stamping due to cost optimization for high-volume custom gears

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.110

0:00
I'm competitive again. It's not like the days of the 90s. When I would first go out there, I'd drive over to Williams WMS at California Avenue in Roscoe, and then I'd go across the street visiting other customer creators, which may make the popcorn machine manufacturer. And then I'd drive out and talk to the guys at Data East, you know, Joe Balser. And then I'd just drive around the corner and see the guys at Premier,
0:40
see Ray Tanzer when he was there, a couple others. I could just, you know, go back and forth to all the different manufacturers, and everybody knew what side their bread was buttered on and knew I wasn't going to, hey, these guys are working on this. Can't wait to see it. It was just a thing. Now, a lot of them, well, back then, too, they would pull us aside and, I got an idea for this. Can we do this, like Billy Parker? Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, we got the old Jurassic Park, the original. Well, that one, we got called into the class, into the principal's classroom. Oh, yeah, that's a great story. Yeah, Gary Stern called. They were just ready to release the movie, Jurassic Park. He had seen an early preview, called us all in there, and we're having problems with this, this, and this. and one of the problems was our motor wasn't holding up. We were the left-right motor on the T-Rex, and they pretty much read all the suppliers, you get with our engineers, get this fixed. I want a pinball machine in every theater across the country so it's there and ready to go, and I don't want any problems. And it was, yes, sir, yes, sir. Turned out it had nothing to do with our motor. the slot was too short and the motor would coast and hit the end of the slot and then the pinion drive and the output gear would break. So we just had to reposition the switches and lengthen the slot and the problem went away. And it's been flawless ever since. We don't get a whole lot of those.
2:34

  • “What we want them to adopt would be brushless DC technology, digitally controlled, which would add a whole different element to the gameplay as well.”

    Vince Patzke@ 28:46 — Shows motor supplier's vision for future pinball motor technology evolution

  • “For us with DC, the one that I sent around is probably one and a half times what our motor and gearbox would be. So the biggest challenge is expense. Volume will help.”

    Mike Patzke@ 30:21 — Cost barrier to adopting new motor technology in pinball

    • Williams Electronics
    company
    Data Eastcompany
    George Gomezperson
    Pinball Lifecompany
    Mad Pinballcompany
    Bay Tech Gamescompany
    Addams Familygame
    Beatlesgame
    Guns N' Rosesgame
    Judge Dreddgame
    Earthshakergame
    Lobster Sportscompany
    Rob Burkeperson
    Popeyegame
    Doctor Whogame
    Harley-Davidsongame

    medium · Mike Patzke: 'We're making our own gear blanks if you haven't heard. So instead of getting this stamped out, we're starting to reshape it... we're making a powder model to do that'

  • $

    market_signal: Taiwan motor sourcing costs have increased approximately 4x in past decade due to geopolitical trade tensions, forcing manufacturers to reshoring to US suppliers

    high · Mike Patzke: 'that X now, because of straight Taiwan and China relations, that X is like four times what it was just 10 years ago... they're just becoming unaffordable to Stern. So now they're starting to come back to us'

  • ?

    product_strategy: Motor supplier developing brushless DC digitally-controlled motors with encoder feedback as next-generation pinball motor technology

    medium · Vince Patzke stated 'What we want them to adopt would be brushless DC technology, digitally controlled, which would add a whole different element to the gameplay as well'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Cost and complexity barriers preventing adoption of brushless DC motors in pinball; brushless DC approximately 1.5x cost of current motors, requires electronics integration

    high · Mike Patzke: 'For us with DC, the one that I sent around is probably one and a half times what our motor and gearbox would be. So the biggest challenge is expense. Volume will help.'

    • But I don't know where I'm at getting ahead of myself and getting stories. I mean, we've got a ton of stuff up here that we can show off. Why don't you start with a little bit of history because we've been jumping all over. Why don't you start off? Yeah, we're all over. I didn't know what to talk about. Rob was just, you've got to speak this year. Now I know why. Thank you again. It is an absolute honor. And I was just going to leave it up to the group to let me know after we give you some history of multi and let me know what you want to hear about. I brought parts. I brought spec sheets. I brought drawings.
    3:13
    It was just some neat things. So a multi-products company was started by my dad and three other guys in Wisconsin.
    3:22
    Two of the brothers, there were three brothers, the Langer brothers, Al and Jack, they were at Motor Research. So if you've ever dug into a really old pinball, it's usually a motor research motor, which our open frame is basically a direct copy of that. Motor research was a direct copy of the electric motor company.
    3:51
    The design of the reset motor, the score reset motor is right there. This is probably from 1930s. My dad worked at that company after he worked at Nash. He would drive the cars off in Kenosha, drive the cars off of the way, cinch them down onto the rail cars so they could be transported across the country. Then he got a job at the electric motor company, I ran a job at Motor Research and left there with two of the Langer brothers, who used to be tool makers at Motor Research, doing the tooling, and made a multi-products company.
    4:37
    And then two of the brothers, a third brother joined in. He was a draftsman. Then a couple of them passed away. One retired, and then my dad had it all to himself. How did Grandpa get involved in the pinball industry? Well, it was just from motor research. It was just the customer base.
    4:58
    You know, that was the main user of it. I mean, we're not just in pinball. We manufactured motors for tennis ball machines, popcorn poppers, hot dog rollers. Agricultural sprayers. Yeah, sprayers.
    5:19
    But the lion's share of the business back then in the 50s was coin-op and jukeboxes and pinball and shooting games, which, Rob, I've got your three motors in my office still. I'll get to them eventually. This was obviously way before solid-state electronics. Yes. Yeah, all electromechanical. The disks would actuate the switches, and the motors would turn them. That design was really, and still is, well-liked.
    5:59
    The last time that motor, well, a motor like that that we currently have, Stern used it in the Beatles pinball that they just had a few years back. the spinning motor, the 45 disc in the middle of the game, was basically that motor, but just the modern version.
    6:21
    What was it like when solid-state electronics first came onto the market and obviously things changed drastically?
    6:31
    My dad thought it was the death of motors in pinball because they didn't need a motor anymore to reset anything. It was all done electronically. Then it started, you know, it was pretty much a dry spell in the mid, early 70s when it first came out.
    6:47
    And then the motor started migrating to the play field and action in the play field. So that's where we saw our revival. And it really ramped up in the late 80s and early 90s, 91, 2, 3. We had two motors in Adam's family.
    7:10
    So in eight months, we had to put out, well, there was 25,000 games, I believe there was, in about an eight-week? 20,000. 20,000 games of Adam's family, and that was just one game that we were supplying two motors per game in an eight- or nine-month period.
    7:31
    So we were working late nights. We'd worked all day, go home for a couple hours, come back for about four or five more hours, and do it all again, just making motors for the, oh, yeah, we got it up here, the hand motor.
    7:49
    So, yeah, it's been in engineering. I grabbed it out of engineering. I don't know if you guys want to pass it around. But all my guys have taken it apart. And as the documentation that we did back in the 90s and even before wasn't very good. It was, hey, do this one like you did on the spec number this. And do use an output shaft from this. And so now when we're making, we'll make 25 or 50 at a time for Marco. And they've got to make it again. and then I go, let's grab the hand out of engineering and we'll make parts. But now we have them drawn. Every gear has a part number. Every pinion, every shaft, casting, every single part has a part number. They can be duplicated. And so we're a whole lot more modern than we used to.
    8:47
    Any questions? In 1965, Midway came out with the quadruple loader on circuits that drives the brain of the unit. Did you go up and up with that or was the improv process there? Oh boy I not intimately familiar with that but I know we had some double stacked motors Yeah there are two double stacks next to each other and they forward backward and they grab the scroll reels Okay Yeah those were either because we needed twice the power than what a single stack could do or they needed it to reverse. That was more often than not. We'd put one coil in one way and another coil in reverse. they had run the same rotor and then we could get the reversing action. Because the original, well there's another brainchild that we had, but the original reversing was the round reversibles where we'd have these, the copper shading ring is what determines the direction that it rotates. They would have two coils, little miniature coils wound up on either side and then they would short the coils to determine the direction the motor would go in. Very labor intense and the wire was so fine that it would break half the time just in shipping to get it to the customer. So then they would just double stack, put a coil in this way, coil in that way, You double stack them. So that's the brainchild of those. In fact, that's what Rob sent me. He's got a couple of those reversing motors. You talked about fixing the left-right dress part.
    10:35
    Did all the production ship with the fixing or did some go out with the motors? That I wouldn't be intimate with. Maybe in the early, early stages there might have been some. I ask because almost every Jurassic Park I play, the left-right doesn't work. Oh, okay.
    10:56
    My son has one, and he just put it in the loader, and it's nice to have it working again. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I don't know how many got on. That would be a stern at that time. It was Data East.
    11:10
    So, sure. So since you mentioned Marco, what is your current policy about rebuilds and repairs? Do you want certain intermediaries to bring them to you? Yeah, we prefer to go. There was a time where we'd go, yeah, send it in, we'll repair it. And we would just get too backlogged. Now we've gone to Steve Young. Steve Young does repairs. If you send him a motor, he'll take it apart, see what's wrong. If he has a part, he'll fix it and send it back to you. Or if he has to get a part from us, then I send him the part.
    11:52
    Because it just, like I said, we make about 150,000 to 175,000 motors a year. So doing one here, one over there, it gets a little, drags us down. But as far as part sales, we don't want to become competitors with our own customer. So like with Stern, we'll tell everybody go back to Stern unless Stern says otherwise or Stern is now working with Marco to distribute their product. But if it's in current production, for sure, I'm not going to sell it, you know, even onesie, twosies, or have it on the shelf.
    12:34
    So, yeah, I just don't want to get in competition. And then Marco and other, we've got Pinball Life and Mad. They're real intimate with the industry and who needs what and what levels to have that at. So we'll just rather sell 25 or 50 or 100 of whatever to them and let them distribute and answer questions. Because we just don't, I'm not that intimate with. We would be swamped with how many requests we get in on a daily, weekly basis.
    13:11
    That's all. We'd have to have dedicated people only doing repairs and doing that full time. Yeah. And there was a time when we were doing repairs, and I got to a point where I was like, oh, sorry, I can't ship this week because I'm working on a repair for Chuck E. Cheese. and then that's like that is completely backwards and so we had to find other ways to do it and Steve Young has been great I've sent him a lot of tooling so he can do stamping I'll send him castings updates that we've made removing the oil plates things like that yeah so he's really stepped up and taking a load off of us. And then there's even motors that are not PINREL related but use other places that we can repair. For jukeboxes as well as arcade games, Baytech is another big customer of ours as well.
    14:26
    Questions? I guess I'll hand you over. Yeah, so you have a bunch of other interests as well. Is pinball your number one or two? Obviously, you can't do too many different numbers, but where does pinball fall? Well, I can tell you right now, I checked it this morning, Stern Pinball is our number one customer right now. Wow, they jumped up the list. They are. Yeah, they have been hovering for many years, around 10, 12. But this past year, they've just gone to five. And then today, this morning, they are our number one customer so far this year. Big reason for that, I would say one of the biggest ones is for Jurassic Park, the anniversary. Yeah, the anniversary. Because they're putting the shaker motors, that's the shaker motor that started out. They, what have we got, shipped 5,000 of those by the end of the month. Yeah, they're just going through those like crazy and just buying motors for all their different use. And they've been using a motor that we've been importing from Taiwan. We started that maybe about 10 years ago. Uh-oh, he's lifting the kimono. And it's okay. It's stories because I like to see what's happening here is Taiwan used to be here. I can send you this motor for X.
    15:58
    That's where I'm going to keep that. All right. I don't want to, I can't. However, that X now, because of straight Taiwan and China relations, that X is like four times what it was just 10 years ago. And I can't, if I add on my profit margin, they're just becoming unaffordable to Stern. So now they're starting to come back to us and buy the motors that are my gearbox and obviously the DC is imported.
    16:28
    Sometimes they buy AC, but rarely. It's more for the spinner, which is essentially this. So that's what I'm really excited about is Stern is coming back and buying the one that we made in furniture. So we're excited about that. This guy over here had a question. The brush life on average, depending upon its use, is about 2,000 hours. And those brushes in there aren't replaceable like the first edition that we used to get. I think the very first one we put a shaker in was for Williams for earth shaker, if I remember right. And we used to have to mill it flat on each end of it. That was just, you know, maybe a little dilly. We had no obvious self-fact that it was going to be... That would leave it as cheap. Yeah, yeah. Dad could pay me a little wage and I would just mill it. So that was my idea to put the drill points in because we can put it in a fixture and drill and drill and use cobalt spotting drill and they go pretty quick now.
    17:51
    I don't even know, oh, I know where I was going with that. So 2,000 hours on the brush life on average is what we'd say.
    17:59
    Are they meant to have weight swinging on them in the bottom of the pinball? I don't know. Now that, interestingly, that particular DC motor, if you open up one of your vacuum cleaners, it a beater bar brush motor from a vacuum cleaner and we buy about 20 a year And about a third of them make it into shaker motors The other ones go into agricultural sprayers Ball valve actuators for a boom sprayer. Yep.
    18:32
    So it's just fun. Fun and a little interesting. So independent on game play. Earthshaker was only, I think if I remember right, Earthshaker was only very multi-ball. It would shake every year in there. In Harley, every time the speakers revved up, the motor was going, so those wore out quicker. It depends on the input.
    18:57
    Fun stuff. What else do we got here? EX inspections, like when we're going through, where did I stop? Here we go.
    19:10
    This is the vintage documentation. Yeah, vintage documentation. I'll send that on the ground. That was when Zofia Bill was at Williams when we started doing the Popeye,
    19:25
    the motor for the Popeye game. So I always have notes on there. It's for Zofia Bill for Popeye. He wants it to work out.
    19:35
    I think the other one was from Drew. Are you sure he gets that back? Are you a Popeye game? I don't know what type he is. Yeah, no, it will. It will because now up there it'll say when it goes to production, it'll have a production number on it. And then they'll, so that section will work. But this one was Dr. Who. The Dalek motor. Yeah, the Dalek is what brings it up and down. And then we had an oscillator up in the top on some of the play fields for back planting. So, but yeah, I can thumb through there. And there was like, I saw Billy Parker and George Gomez.
    20:22
    He's at Williams. What is it really? It's at Williams here. Just doing an ear box, doing an input, just kind of raise and lower something. I remember working with George Gomez.
    20:33
    Oh, boy, this is back when I was just starting out. My dad and I went to a trade show and Bromley, Warren Bromley, the Bromley Incorporated in New York is there. He wanted to make a game that flew a helicopter. And he had a little thing hanging off of it and it went back and forth. But he wanted the helicopter to actually fly.
    20:55
    So I took one of these DCs. Hmm? One that still landed in the bag. Yeah, one of these DCs and I put an eighth inch shaft on it, sent it to tools, and he's like, yeah, work, great, send me 100 more. And then it all went. So... How does the design get to be a full-time job? Do they get all the business back or is there a really complicated design? Now, because everything's online and we're in the SolidWorks era, they can pretty much get their idea and the whole design and everything done in SOLIDWORKS, send it to our engineer. Our engineer will put in the right period. We'll make a sample, and it goes to them, and then they test it. It used to be, as I'm walking through, somebody would catch me and go, hey, I got an idea for this. Just send me a motor. I don't care what the shaft is. I just need 10 RPM at 12 volts DC. or I need 20 volts DC so I have a little more power but I want it to be this. Sure. Okay, I'd make one up real quick and then that's when we do this. And then it would come back with a drawing. I brought everything because I figured the statute of limitations was okay. Like, here's Ernie Pizarro. He'll send me this from Williams and say, now make me another 10 samples. But here's all the dimensions I want. So that was for Judge Dredd with dual rotation. And that actually started like that. We used it in Judge Dredd and all of our oscillators. ones that would go back and forth, that started life as a water softener motor.
    22:57
    So Echo Water would buy tens of thousands of those. And then the two holes that I used for the pinions to run the counter-rotating shaft, well, those originally mounted a switch that would have the cam to turn on and off your water softener. So that's where it started life. And then the oscillator came across. There was a massage therapist that approached my dad and said, I need a moment to go back and forth because I'm going to put long brushes on it so it will just gently stroke somebody's back like a peacock. So my dad developed the oscillator. And then you have one engineer at Williams that gets a hold of it. Another engineer, Williams, gets a hold of it. They're like, oh, I want that in this next game. So it was family hand. You know, teed off in premier.
    23:58
    Yeah. Oh, big hurt. Glove motor, big hurt. So yeah, everyone needed an oscillator motor. So it's fun. So we've got a follow up question. So you mentioned that some of these requests, they're telling you RPMs they want.
    24:18
    Are they often telling you how much torque they want? Yeah. Yeah, sometimes it's vague because you don't know. There's not a whole lot of torque needed in a pinball machine. It's more for animation, typically. Yeah, but like the thing hand has a certain weight it's going to lift. Yeah, yeah. Then they'll say, hey, and usually it's through trial and error. they'll say it didn't work real good, so give me something with more torque. So we'll put a bigger GC out of there, a little more torque here, AC. So, anyway, this is the first one. Speaking of the feather thing. Terminator 2. Speaking of that feather thing, didn't Grandpa also design the motor that went in the vibrating vats? Yes, that was the multi... Magic fingers. Yeah, but that was a motor only. We'd take just the motor with two end caps on it, and a counterweight on it, and magic fingers, so the quarter next to the machine in your hotel room when you put it in, that was our motors in there too. I think the last one we did, the guy, there was a real estate lawyer in Miami, Florida that bought it and wanted to resurrect it. And we were selling him motors.
    25:44
    And it just didn't fly. So I don't even know. Yeah, we haven't sold to them since probably 2000, late 90s, 2000. Here's another one you can see. I'm not sure what one that is. That is the hanging order. That is the Addams Family hand order. This was the quick drawings for the bookcase order. Those are the two drawings that we would have gotten for Addams Family. No, I don't know what you're up to. Good stuff right now.
    26:26
    All righty. Oh, yeah? Okay. What's that? No. No, we've never, all local employees. Yeah, we've never hired from the industry. We're far enough away. We're an hour north in Racine, Wisconsin, so people don't want to make the trip, I guess, to this community, living down here. So, but yeah, I grew up going to the Conrad Hilton as a little kid for the little M.O.A. shows that they would have. Can you give us some stories about that? I heard somebody brought a book. My dad would have to tell you that, no. One time that I did throw up on an airplane was the night after in New Orleans, being at the hospitality suite for the Data East guys I always get invited to those And we were naming the hurricanes We had all of Pat O which is a restaurant on Bourbon Street We were up to Hurricane Pitcher N We were naming the hurricanes and we just got absolutely full out of it. And the next day I had to fly back home and threw up on the airplane. I never did that before and I haven't done it since. Another interesting story was Guns N' Roses pinball. When Stern first had that, he was in Las Vegas. He got invited to the hospitality suite and met Slash. All I could think was, I've never seen this much hair. It's just incredible the amount of hair that that guy.
    28:16
    You can see his face, the hat. It's fantastic. I've got a coin here. I'm tired of your hair. Yeah. As far as... What we want them to adopt would be brushless DC technology, digitally controlled, which would add a whole different element to the gameplay as well. Some manufacturers do that, brushless DC.
    29:05
    You have to pass that along. But as far as not, how the motor needs to turn things, makes things rotate. So they'll keep doing that. Maybe it's not so much what, but the how. Going back to the, it's a little more sterile now than what it used to be. I don't have that intimate relationship with the engineers at Stern or Jersey Jack. They take our model from our website and they'll design it up. design it up, tell us, you know, and have all the things. They'll even have it so it's designed into their assembly. And they just make this and then we'll send them a sample and then they send us any changes and then it's production. Boom. So that, that intimate, you know, so it's more of the, the how has changed, not so much the what. Or what it's doing. Does that answer the question? I'm a bit of a questioner so I just have one question. I'm here. You want to do it that way. Why are you in the house with that way? Is it a pattern? Is it a number? Or is it just a time? Well, the biggest thing is expense at this point. For us with DC, the one that I sent around is probably one and a half times what our motor and gearbox would be. So the biggest challenge is expense. Volume.
    30:36
    Volume will help. The other thing is that the fear is getting, now they have to work with the control side of things in the electronics.
    30:48
    Getting that step. So it would be adding stuff there where the motor, you know, AC motors are down, either they're on or off. EC motors too, but you can reverse them by reversing the polarity.
    31:01
    Essentially not to use the motor. Like what's the name? You can stop it, you can reverse it, you can hold it, you can change the speed, and you know where the location of the shaft is all the time. Because it's got a built-in encoder. So it's a lot smarter. Application. Does it eliminate the gearbox? In some cases it does eliminate the gearbox, which you don't like to see because there's our gear manufacturer. Thank you. Right. Pretty much, yeah.
    31:45
    Yeah, like, here's a deer. All right, and you don't make it, but it's a guy across the street. That's one that we make for a LED emergency lighting manufacturer. Well, that goes into Bay Tech games now, too. Oh, yeah, that's true.
    32:03
    engineers, I was walking down the hallway, another case of the engineer, says, hey, you've got just a half-fin shaft out on either side, we've got to make a coupler and turn down our shaft. Can you make a gear that we can just shove the shaft through and put a keyway in there and it'll just save us so much? And I'm like, yeah, I can do that. How am I going to do that? And that's what I came up with, a hollow gear and built-in spacers. So we machine the casting out and it saves them a ton of time and they're happy to pay the extra. It's a new game that's currently in development. Yeah. What's it called? It's a great question. When it's in development, they put a fake name on it so even all their internal people don't even know and accept them. So, suppliers don't know. So, it might be, I know they came out with an axe throwing game and it was all something, you know, some unrelated, you know, like jam sandwich game, you know, something like that.
    33:15
    Goofy. My favorite one was furry hats. Right. I know I've got a lot of stuff out there and I know we're running out of time. Here's Bay Tech games, another one. This is some add-ons that we're doing. We do a lot of the electronic suppression and stuff that they would have to do in-house. So we do a lot of the add-ons. But this goes into the ping pong ball game. Quick drop. That's it. Yes. So this is the rotation of the table.
    33:57
    So that's that one. Another one of our customers is Lobster Sports. So if you see tennis ball machines, we don't shoot out the ball, but we stir the ball. That's what this motor does. And we'll make the shoot go up and down or left and right. So we do about 17,000 of these motors for one manufacturer. Who uses this very tenfold machine? But I'm not going to question it. You just did. I know, I just did, figuratively. My son's wearing it. Oh, it's questioning. But yeah, I could go on and on and on. I brought a bunch of parts if you wanted to see how the evolution of things. Motors, motor design. Motor design, gear blanks, which, by the way, We're making our own gear blanks if you haven't heard. So instead of getting this stamped out, we're starting to reshape it. So that's the start of a gear.
    35:03
    When our gear gets too expensive, because there's a lot of parts to them, and we're making a powder model to do that. But sometimes volume makes us do that. He's our gear cutter, by the way. We send him gear blanks, and he cuts them for us. We don't do our pinion yet.
    35:22
    Red. Yeah, so we'll get 12-foot bars of pinion, and we cut them into small little gears called pinions,
    35:34
    and they're not going to do it. So where are we at on time? Wait. Am I? I mean, I don't want to beat up anyone. Are there any other questions, final questions, thoughts, concerns, conundrums, quarrels, planifications? We make them original for CERN and then, or Jersey Jack, but Marco, you know, still makes, we make them in quantity for Marco and other distributors.
    36:17
    So if there's enough volume requested, I'll make them. So I'm here. I'll keep talking as long as you want me to talk or I'm allowed to talk. Thank you.