Date: 18th-20th May, 2018 Location: Lodi Grape Festival Fairgrounds, 413 E. Lockeford Street, Lodi, California 95240, USA The final day of GSPF 2018 began at 9am but it’s a shorter day with the doors closing at 5pm. As usual, I headed straight to the Jackson Hall to prepare for the first of the day’s three Pin-U talks. The team from Spooky Pinball were making their first visit to California and came to GSPF to talk about the history of the company, the games they have built, and to explain how their latest title Alice Cooper’s Nighmare Castle works.  The Spooky Pinball team Charlie Emery narrated a picture and video slideshow looking at how their games are made and some of the personalities involved such as Rob Zombie and Alice Cooper.  Charlie talks about working with Alice Cooper Charlie then moved to the Alice Cooper game to demonstrate the shots, and show how the features and rules work. Audio of this talk will be coming soon. At 1pm David Volansky took to the stage to explain how to read and use electromechanical games’ schematics.  David Volansky After examining a number of case studies where faults were diagnosed by using the schematics, David explained how an electromechanical pinball’s electrical system works and broke it down into the key sub-systems such as the score motor and the score reels. The final Pin-U talk was by pinball repairer, restorer, operator and seller, Chris Kuntz. The subject of Chris’s talk was Stern Pinball’s Spike control system and to help describe it he brought along a Stern Star Wars machine.  Chris Kuntz He described the differences between the previous generation of control boards – the SAM system – and then how the first generation of Spike compares to the current second generation which can drive colour LCD monitors. Chris then moved on to the different types of node boards used in a game, from the core and cabinet boards to the satellite boards under the playfield or mounted elsewhere depending on the model. Audio of this talk will be coming soon. One problem with working at Pin-U is missing some of the other events and there are quite a few including the pin-golf tournament and the machine raffle drawings and the Flippin’ Friday Kick-Off Party at which Cliff Rinear was presented with the new Steve Charland Spirit Award.  The Flippin’ Friday Kick-Off Party (picture: Art Perez)  Cliffy Rinear received the Steve Charland Spirit Award (picture: Art Perez)  Cliffy’s recipients In the pin-golf tournament, the winner was Per Schwarzenberger who finished ahead of second place Nick Fitzpatrick. Brian O’Neill was third and Nic Stein fourth. Full results are available at: gspf.tomlogic.com. While I might have been busy at Pin-U during Saturday’s draw for the first of two pinball machines, the stage and equipment had been torn down and packed away by the time Sunday’s draw took place. Saturday’s winner chose the Lethal Weapon 3, leaving the Sorcerer for Sunday’s winner to take home.  Sunday’s prize draw machine The draw took place at 4:30pm.  The winning ticket is chosen The winning ticket was bought by Michael Bender.  Michael and his prize Following the pinball machine draw, the regular raffle was drawn. This consisted of multiple prizes from which entrants could choose. Tickets for the raffle cost $1 each or six tickets for $5. Tickets could be applied to any of the prizes, and when the raffle ended at 4:30pm, a winning ticket was drawn for each prize.  The announced  Another winning ticket is drawn By the time all the prizes had been awarded (no, I didn’t win anything) it was just about 5pm which meant the end of the show and the turning off of power to all the machines.  I have the power..oh wait, no I don’t The packing away of stands and machines then began in earnest.  Show’s over As a memento of their contribution to the show, all machine donors received this commemorative fob for their keys.  The Grant) All of which brings my Golden State Pinball Festival 2018 coverage to an end. I’ll be adding the remaining audio from the Pinball University talks over the next few days and there will ultimately be videos of the talks available on the GSPF’s planned YouTube channel. I hope you have enjoyed my coverage. I’ll be back with my closing thoughts, but that’s all for now.