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Mike Kalinowski - Vancouver Flipout Pinball Expo 2018

Pinball News (Vancouver Flipout 2018)·video·56m 24s·analyzed·Sep 9, 2018
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.031

TL;DR

Mike Kalinowski details pinball manufacturing journey and technical innovations from Australian factory in China

Summary

Mike Kalinowski presents the technical and business journey of building pinball machines in China, covering his electronics background, factory setup in Guangzhou/Shenzhen, personal challenges including his wife Karen's death, and detailed manufacturing processes for custom pinball components and machines. He discusses sourcing, prototyping, design challenges, and the advantages of manufacturing in China while emphasizing his focus on engineering rather than gameplay.

Key Claims

  • Mike Kalinowski designed and manufactures custom pinball boards (24-inch octo boards) in batches of 100 at his factory

    high confidence · Direct statement about board redesign from scratch and current production at factory

  • His wife Karen passed away from breast cancer approximately two years into the pinball machine project

    high confidence · Personal testimony; described complex legal/financial complications with assets in her name

  • Manufacturing in metric rather than imperial saved approximately 50% on costs for custom parts

    high confidence · Direct quote: 'if I wanted anything other than metric, the price was going to be 50% more'

  • Kalinowski's factory produces all pinball components in-house including screws, injection molds, circuit boards, and mechanical parts

    high confidence · Multiple detailed examples of in-house manufacturing capabilities demonstrated

  • A programmer on Kalinowski's staff died in the factory apartment block during software development, creating legal complications in China

    high confidence · Detailed personal account of the incident and $50,000 cost to resolve

  • Stainless steel manufacturing costs only 5% more than ordinary steel in China but eliminates plating/painting costs, making it cheaper overall

    high confidence · Direct engineering cost comparison statement

  • Kalinowski's first pinball run consisted of 30-35 machines

    high confidence · Direct statement: 'our first run, which was 30, 35 I think machines'

  • Sascha Voskoli (forum username 'Zaza' on Pinside) created technical drawings for Kalinowski's service manual

    high confidence · Explicit credit given to Sascha for schematic diagrams

  • China provides manufacturing advantages including rapid prototyping (one week from concept to working mechanism) and availability of specialized suppliers

Notable Quotes

  • “I'm not really that interested in pinball machines as a game playing machine, to be honest. My interest is more from the technical side, from the electronic side, the building of the mechanisms and so on.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 1:49 — Establishes his focus on engineering/manufacturing rather than gameplay design; sets expectations for technical rather than rules-focused discussion

  • “We're making every single part in the whole machine, everything, including the screws.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 18:20 — Demonstrates vertical integration and control over production; unusual level of in-house capability for pinball manufacturer

  • “It's the availability. And I'm sure Joe and Jack will agree with me here that it's the of this sort of thing at a sensible sort of price and right now. That's our advantage.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 22:43 — Explains core competitive advantage of China-based manufacturing; references industry figures Joe and Jack as witnesses

  • “Some people like to call me racist. I find that a little difficult to accept when my girlfriend's Taiwanese and I employ a lot of Chinese people.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 20:38 — Addresses community criticism regarding his China operations; provides context about staff and personal relationships in response to apparent social media criticism

  • “We couldn't find the pens. I just didn't know what quite to do, so we made our own.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 23:27 — Illustrates problem-solving approach and in-house capability; describes manufacturing custom polarizing pins for connectors

Entities

Mike KalinowskipersonKaren KalinowskipersonSascha VoskolipersonDavid HankinpersonSidpersonMichellepersonVancouver Flipout 2018eventGuangzhoulocationShenzhenlocation

Signals

  • ?

    business_signal: Significant personnel challenges affecting production timeline: programmer death created legal complications in China, pregnant staff member departed for maternity leave, creating project delays

    high · Direct testimony of programmer's death, $50,000 cost to resolve, HR intervention required; pregnant staff member departing

  • ?

    business_signal: Kalinowski operates vertical manufacturing with in-house capabilities for nearly all pinball components (screws, boards, injection molding, circuit boards, mechanical parts), indicating significant capital investment and manufacturing sophistication

    high · Multiple detailed examples of in-house production; statement 'We're making every single part in the whole machine, everything, including the screws'

  • ?

    community_signal: Technical community collaboration: Kalinowski credits Sascha Voskoli (Pinside forum member 'Zaza') with comprehensive engineering drawings for service manual, indicating open-source/collaborative design documentation

    high · Direct credit to Sascha for 'unbelievable drawings' and schematic diagrams; described as 'amongst the best in entire career'

  • ?

    competitive_signal: China manufacturing provides sustainable cost advantage through supplier ecosystem availability, rapid iteration, and material cost benefits (5% premium for stainless steel vs. plating/painting savings)

    high · Multiple cost comparisons and efficiency statements; reference to 'sensible sort of price' only available in China

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Kalinowski prioritizes engineering robustness: use of soft/pliable rubber models instead of hard plastic to prevent breakage; flexible PETG plastics instead of brittle acrylic despite cost; stainless steel for durability

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.169

0:00
This is a Pinball News Production. And if you were to see the state of this place on Thursday, it was a complete disaster. Machines and bits and pieces of machines absolutely everywhere. So it's come together incredibly well. I even had my doubts when I first saw the place. It was so huge and there's machines just splattered everywhere. But it's turned out well to learn the tummy. some of you have probably listened to me chat last year about my adventures in china and possibly even saw the the show that i did in davitry where i had a talk with a pretty big group there so i'm not going to rehash all of that but for those of you who haven't seen anything before i don't know much about myself or home you know i am going to start from the beginning but I'm going to be very quick and skip through it so if you've seen it before you can daze off for five minutes and I'll just run through some of the things that have happened. That's actually our factory about a month ago I think. So things have come along since last year of course when we haven't yet built machines. I'll start at the beginning. I guess I'm not going to talk about the machine, I'm not going to talk about the gameplay of the machine. You can go and play it for yourself, it's out there, help yourself. I'm not going to talk about how you make this shot or how you get that shot. I'm not really that interested in pinball machines as a game playing machine, to be honest. My interest is more from the technical side, from the electronic side, the building of the mechanisms and so on. So it's up to you guys to go and play the machine and decide if you like it or not. That was done by people other than myself. If you want to talk about the mechanisms or how we did it electronically, that's great. Come and talk to me. So that's where my talk is going to come from, more from the engineering side, more from how we ended up in China building this machine and why. So that's what we're going to chat about today. It all started back when I just left school. I got an apprenticeship in the electronics industry at a radio control model manufacturing place. We also made radio control equipment for government departments and so on. And part of my job was to go out to the flying field during the week and test our new radio gear to make sure it was up to speed and working properly. And my mates all hated me because that was my job to go and fly model aeroplanes.

high confidence · Multiple statements about prototyping speed and supplier ecosystem

  • Kalinowski also manufactures Hankin video game tables as a secondary business to keep factory staff occupied while developing pinball machines

    high confidence · Detailed explanation of Hankin table production and partnership with David Hankin

    • “The glue itself didn't give. It actually ripped the plastic.”

    Mike Kalinowski@ 30:49 — Details engineering testing process for epoxy adhesive strength in vacuum-formed plastic lockdown bars

    Cairns
    location
    Brisbanelocation
    Thunderbirdsgame
    Terminator 2game
    The Molegame
    Williams Pocorinogame
    BSD Draculagame
    Hankin (video game tables)product
    PETG plasticproduct
    Pinside forumsorganization
    Hankin Mould Factorycompany
    Speaker Factorycompany

    high · Multiple material choices explained with durability rationale; emphasis on impact resistance and long-term reliability

  • ?

    manufacturing_signal: Rapid prototyping capability in China: one week from concept to working prototype mechanism, enabling faster iteration and problem-solving than traditional manufacturing

    high · Direct statement: 'we can prototype something and a week later we've got the working mechanism'

  • ?

    product_concern: Toy factory supplier quality control issues: drill mechanism required multiple iterations, T2 model had reversed number despite drawings provided; language barrier cited but execution errors unacceptable

    high · Detailed examples of failed first and second attempts; engineer criticism; eventual resolution after multiple iterations

  • ?

    business_signal: Kalinowski diversified into Hankin video game table manufacturing as secondary revenue stream to maintain factory staff utilization during extended pinball development cycle

    high · Explicit statement about needing to keep staff occupied; decision to manufacture Hankin tables to fund pinball development; over 800 units produced

  • ?

    technology_signal: Use of vacuum-formed plastic for lockdown bars instead of traditional die-cast metal represents innovation in manufacturing process and cost reduction

    high · Detailed explanation of vacuum-forming experimentation after failed die-casting attempts; special epoxy testing for adhesive strength

    • 2:56
    It wasn't plain sailing every day. We had our moments and that's how we learned how make the stuff better and I'll put my hand up to being responsible for some of those problems too. About the same time my parents moved away from Brisbane, I was still fairly young and I had to move in with my uncle and auntie and that's when I met the girl next door and we were married a couple of years later and my first recollection, well my first photograph, Jack's seen this one before, of me with a pinball machine is a Williams Pocorino. That was a bunch of flowers that my then boss gave me for Karen, my wife, on the birth of our son. So I can date that picture exactly. That's about 40 years ago now. Various things happened in the industry. I worked for several different companies at that time as a repairman, repairing pinballs primarily. And then videos hit, of course, as we all know, and killed pinball off. So I sort of drifted out of the industry for a while. And we moved to Cairns, which is right at the top of Australia, in the Great Barrier Reef, started our own business and had that for about 12 years before we sold it. Karen, in fact, did an apprenticeship while we had that business and she was also a television technician. Not long after, maybe five years after starting that business, I had bought a BSD, a Dracula, at an auction. It was in a very bad way. The glass was broken, the lock down bar was missing, all the boards were in the bottom of the cabinet. It was just a mess. And it went pretty cheap at the auction. I forget the price, a few hundred dollars. Nobody wanted it because they didn't know what to do with it, of course. It was beyond most people what they wanted it, what effort put into it. So after I took that home and fixed it up, over a period of a couple of months just tinkering with it and getting back into pinball, if you like, I was asked by an owner of a BSD if I could make a board that would fix the 24-inch octo. I wasn't aware at the time that it was a problem. I had the machine of course but mine worked fine. I never bothered to investigate that part of it much. But as it turns out one of the components on the board was just unavailable and still is today. So that board is very very difficult to come by and even in machines that get parted out the board is suspect anyway. So I set about redesigning that board from scratch. The board looks a little bit similar to the original but in fact electronically it's completely different. and that was me on my little workbench under the house, just making sure that it would cover the distance of 24 inches. It's incorrectly made in the service manual as a 24-octo board. In fact, it's a 24-inch octo.
    5:46
    I made those at home, and I started a little business making them myself at home, and that has now expanded. Now we make those boards in batches of 100 in the factory, and we sell quite a lot of those boards. That's my dog at the time helping me unpack. I think it was a getaway at the time. We were unpacking and then as I sold the electronic business I was encouraged by a friend to go and visit a couple of trade shows in China. And the result of all that was I had lots of contacts and they kept asking me, after they found out that I visited these trade shows in China, they kept asking me, can you help us look for this part or look for that thing or whatever, mostly electronic things because that was my background. So people were asking me if I could help them locate stuff. And that sort of grew into a mini business. And the problem was these people only wanted six boxes of this or a hundred of those and it was difficult to freight them. So in the end I leased a small place in Guangzhou and it was just big enough to hold a 20 foot container full of goods. So I would buy all these bits and pieces for the various customers, stack them all in there over the period of a couple of months and then when we had a container we'd ship it out and divvy it up and send it out. That was my first employee in China, Michelle on the left there. She helped me get through some of the dramas. Laving containers in Guangzhou is hot work as you can see. It was a hard night that night. We then, a guy that I knew in Australia had a small office in China in Shenzhen, which is the electronics capital of, well, the world really, but certainly China. And he opened an office there and he asked if I would like to come on board and share some office space and staff with him, which I thought was a good idea. So I did that and that's a few of our staff. We looked after them pretty well. It was somebody's birthday, that's why I've got that picture. But we shared the staff costs, we shared the office space and that's where it ended. There was no business relationship like some people have tried to make out recently. There was no connection whatsoever apart from rental space and sharing staff. It was difficult for me to do much. I got this thought that maybe things are going to go a bit further in China. So I thought I'd better go and get my driver's licence, which I did. And then the logical extension to that, of course, is to get a car. So I've had two cars in China. The first one, well, not cars, I guess they're trucks. The one top left was my first one. It was a Nissan, or a Nissan for you.
    8:36
    And they're both dual-cab utes, we call them in Australia. You can probably call them pick-ups, I suppose. And the first one I bought, the part of this story that I find a little humorous is the first one I bought from under a bridge. That's actually the car sales yard under the bridge there. And the second one I bought from under power lines because they seem to cram these places in wherever they've got any spare space that nobody else wants. So that's what you get. The first one was the petrol Nissan, which was an exceptionally good car. But I found out after owning it for five years that cars in trucks, sorry, pick-ups in China, have a 10-year life. After 10 years, they have to be crushed. They don't even sell them. They don't export them anywhere else. And mine was an ex-police vehicle. So we've had leather seats and airbags and we've had all the bells and whistles. It was top of the line. But I discovered about six months to go, that was it. And when they've got less than a year to run on the registration, you can't transfer the registration to anyone else. So you're stuck with it. In the end I had to go and look for another vehicle. up with something that's two things I said I'd never own, a diesel and a great wall.
    9:42
    So it's a diesel great wall, and I have to say I've had it for about a year, and I'm pretty impressed for what it is, for the price of it, and for what it does. It's an excellent vehicle for the factory. I've got three staff now that drive it, so it's better that it's not a Mercedes, so they can just knock around with it. About that time, the guy I was renting was sharing the rental space with the office space, said let's, you know, he wanted to start making 3D printers and I said, well, Karen and I discussed this, we want to make pinball machines. Don't ask me how we concluded all that, that's another story. But we decided to go looking for factory space now. We had the office, the lease was coming up on that in about six months and we thought it was timely to make a move and look for some office space. So we went around looking at various places and this is how you rent office space in China. It's empty, there's nothing. There's no lights, there's no PowerPoints, nothing. That's how you get it, it's empty. And often if you're lucky, you'll even get lots of rubble on the floor like that. And we looked at a dozen different places and finally we settled on a place that had two areas and that's taken the day that we looked at it. That's how I took the place over, with the junk on the floor as you see it. And we had this area in this building and a second area which was more officey in the building adjacent to it, all on one property. So initially we shared both those spaces because that's just the deal we had with one another. And we started building our businesses from scratch, as you can see. This was the first day of the lease when we moved in. They divided the building in half for me because it was a two-figure space. So we built a wall in the middle and that's the debris that we had to pay to have taken away. That's just what happens over there. Anyway, we set about fixing up, he set about fixing up his 3D printing section in one of the other parts of the flash building and I had this rough building to work out because we wanted more workshop space. His stuff lent itself more to office type things, making a 3D printer. So the various rooms we put together, that's the main area, starting to buy some equipment. People have asked me quite a lot, I live in China full time. Karen used to come and visit and stay for a month. I'd go back home and visit for a month. So it went backwards and forwards like that for a while. That's after we cleaned it all up and we got it sorted out, ready to start putting gear in there. And that was taken this year. Now that it's filled up and stuff. They're a little bit out of order, these pictures. That was after I bought a Grongo car off wheel and a Welder and a few things, I started making the first benches and bought some equipment. The CNC machine being delivered, the vacuum forming machine, and yeah, it's a little bit out of whack. That's a bunch of trough octoboards we're running. We do have quite a large business in aftermarket pinball boards and they sell quite well around the place and they've proved to be quite reliable. That was one visit with Karen and one of our very first pinball cabinets, the prototype cabinet, based pretty loosely on a WMS cabinet, standard body, standard glass, but of course all metric because China's metric. Early on, I spoke to quite a few engineering places that we were considering using to make some of our parts, and it quickly became obvious that if I wanted anything other than metric, the price was going to be 50% more. And when we looked across the board, we looked at all the bits and pieces we would have to make. It was obvious the budget was going to get blown out if we needed to do that, so we decided early on to stay metric, and that's what we are, 100% metric. That's a trip Gary did one time. He came and visited the factory to see what we were up to sniffing around. And then about two years into the project, Karen passed away from breast cancer. So that threw a bit of a spanner in the works. And in Australia, and probably here too, it's pretty common in business that husband and wife divide the responsibilities up. all the assets were in Karen's name and all the money for this pinball project was in her name and all the liabilities were in my name. So I had nothing other than debts and she had all the money tied up and I couldn get to it even though it was all left to me It took nearly a year to actually resolve that before the money was freed up So I had a pretty tough year trying to scratch around and get enough money to pay the rent and pay the staff and keep things going By that time we had about eight staff or something.
    14:15
    And that's not really applicable here. There was a story I told in Daventry in England. Karen was a customs officer at Cairns Airport. And when one of her colleagues rang me and said, could she come along to the service, I said, absolutely, please do. and Karen would love it if you came in uniform. Oh, can I bring a friend? I said, anyone who wants to come, that's fine. And our house is in Karanda, which is kind of a hippie village up in the rainforest. And you can imagine what all the hippies thought when a busload of customs officers turned up and started piling out of the bus. I reckon they would have headed for the hills.
    14:51
    But anyway, it was quite touching to see that they all turned up and paid their respects. Hank and Tables, you see the video game table outside here. We've made those for quite some time. It was initially... It was obvious that Pinball was going to take a lot longer than we'd originally pictured and worked on it, so we thought we needed to do something to basically get the staff, give them something to do. They were sitting around all day sweeping the floor, not much to do. So somebody I had already bought a load of video game tables for approached me and said, hey, they sold well, can you get me another lot? And I said, well, we've got a factory now, we can build those ourselves. How about we do that? And then we took it a step further, and in Australia, the name Hankin is quite well known. They also made seven pinballs back in the day, too.
    15:43
    I rang up David Hankin, who's still in business and still has lots of pub sites, with mainly pool tables and jukeboxes, but I rang him up and I said, hey, how about we remake your original table and he was all for the idea so that's what we've done and I think the one out here is serial number 800 and something so we've made quite a few and that kept the factory rolling along and we could then nibble away at pinball stuff but it gave the staff something to do. We could set the workshop up and get equipment happening. That picture's a couple of years old now, the staff at that time. I've got Sid standing next to me there. Sid's a retired electronics guy, ex-Air Force guy.
    16:23
    And he's a friend. He's the father-in-law of a friend of mine. And he rang me up one day out of the blue and said, look, I don't know what to do with myself. He said, I've retired. I'm sitting around the pool drinking piss all day, getting drunk. And he said, I'm just killing myself. Can I come and give you a hand? I said, sure, you know, come on over. So he said, oh, look, I'll come for a month and see what happens. That was three years ago.
    16:47
    So he keeps coming back, which is great. And that's something originally when we discussed, Karen and I discussed building this factory and we decided to go ahead with it. We thought that we would be able to find some pinball people that would give us a hand, if you like. I mean, come on board for even a month or so here and there. No, I put the feelers out. I offered all sorts of incentives and we didn't get one taken. Nobody, it seems, was interested in either helping or coming to China or both, I'm not sure which, or both.
    17:19
    But anyway, we pulled through and the next couple of shots, not long after, well just as I was resolving the monetary situation and getting back on track with that and all the paperwork had been finalised and the banks finally freed the money up to me, my programmer died in the apartment block. Now in China, the boss or the company provides the accommodation to the staff. And we've got eight, I think, apartments. And the staff live in those apartments. Some of them are married. They've got their own apartment. Others share an apartment. A few guys share one apartment. But this guy had his own apartment, thank goodness. And he'd been working on the software for quite some time. We got it to the point where it was ready to use, but it certainly wasn't finalised or polished. it still had a year to go on it. But we were at the point where we were working through it and it was marrying up with the whitewoods we'd been building. And remember we're building everything from scratch here. We're making every single part in the whole machine, everything, including the screws. So he passed away and that created another pile of problems for me because in China there's all sorts of other rules and regulations come into play and I couldn't work my way through them. And the girl in the middle at the front there was heavily pregnant at the time and she threw her hands in the air and said I can't handle this anymore I'm going on maternity leave. So she up and left and left me holding the baby and I had to work my way through this mess with the deceased guy and his family and sort all that problem out.
    19:00
    Fortunately I had met about two weeks before a Taiwanese girl just at a party somewhere I just I don't remember the exact circumstances because it was only a casual meeting and we exchanged WeChat, which is Chinese Skype. And I was at a loss to know what to do about this employee and he said, you are really getting aggressive about all this to resolve it. So I rang her and said, look, she speaks very good English. I said, can you, she was running a factory at the time with 800 staff. She was an HR person in a bicycle factory owned by Taiwanese in China. and I said, can you have a day off work and come and try and help me sort through this mess? I just don't know what to do about it. So she came over and we had a few meetings. She ended up staying three days to sort it out. We ended up sorting it out with the family and the police stamped it and everything was signed off and that was fine.
    19:53
    $50,000 later, it was fine. And she was so good at all that negotiating and so on, I said, look, my other girl's gone away for a year. I need some help here. How about you come and help me? So she came on board and worked.
    20:12
    The next slide's not there for some reason. So she came and ran the factory for me, which was great. And then one thing led to another, and we're now boyfriend and girlfriend. So my son still doesn't forgive me because it's too soon. It's just what happens, it's life. Bad things get thrown at you and sometimes someone comes along and helps you sort them out and that's exactly what happened. So some people like to call me racist. I find that a little difficult to accept when my girlfriend's Taiwanese and I employ a lot of Chinese people. So I don't know, work that out yourself. When we were building the Henkin tables, some of our customers wanted uprights. We made a few batches of these uprights you can see there. They weren't terribly popular. They had no coin mix was the main problem as it turned out. We were trying to build a very cheap machine for the home market and they just weren't overly that popular. We started, you know, around that time we started to really ramp up to making the pinball parts. So we've got some pop bumper assemblies here and some bearing brackets and there's the infamous screws that we make.
    21:25
    More and more parts that we were building, switch assemblies. We make everything. We injection mould the... We actually make our own injection mould dies in house and then injection mould parts, anything up to about three inches we can do in house. So those are the spaces there we make for the switches and that's a switch being assembled. Every part is made by us at assembly including riveting the contact into the switch. That's the final assembly of some targets by the looks of that. We try and make all the switch blades so that there's only about four different switch blade parts and the way we assemble them we can assemble about six different types of switches doing it that way. Ball troughs, mostly stainless steel. The advantage in China is that we can make stuff out of stainless steel for not much more than ordinary steel, maybe 5% more. But then you don't have to plate it or treat it or paint it. So in fact making it out of stainless steel ends up cheaper than making it out of ordinary steel. So that suits our purpose. It's also faster because you can have the parts laser cut or stamped, depending on the quantity you're doing, and folded and assembled within days. We can prototype something and a week later we've got the working mechanism. It's that good. And that's one of the things about China. People ask me a lot, why do they go to China and want to do it somewhere else? It's the availability. And I'm sure Joe and Jack will agree with me here that it's the of this sort of thing at a sensible sort of price and right now. That's our advantage. We've been slowed down a little bit initially but that advantage really came to the fore this last six months when we were really coming home with the project. Speaker Factory, which isn't far from us, made all the speakers for us and we had a run of those made. One thing that was impossible to find, standard connector, pinball connector, but the polarising pins, No, we could not find it. We spent months looking for polarising pens. We could buy the housings, we could buy the connectors, rolls and connectors, we've got plenty of machines to stamp the connectors on, but we couldn't find the pens. I just didn't know what quite to do, so we made our own. We made up a die and we made our own polarising pens. It's just silly little things like that that take time and you have to keep working at it and keep making them. That's our little injection moulding machine, just a small vertical thing. Some other bits and pieces, just various plastic parts that we've been making to bring it all home. Hot bumpers. Some metal parts. This is really only about three or four months ago when we were really bringing the project home and getting lots of parts made for our first run, which was 30, 35 I think machines our first run. This was 35 lots of it and just back from the platers, various bits and pieces from the platers.
    24:16
    That's the printed circuit board on the top of our pop bumper. We've got three pop bumper circuits. One is clear and it shines down through the body, if you have a look at that. People used to comment a lot on that to me, but nobody here has said that. Maybe they haven't noticed that the pop bumper actually illuminates the playfield by shining through the clear.
    24:35
    Torridal transformers were used. Again, torridal transformers are usually fairly expensive, but in China they're only 5 or 10% more than a standard transformer so we use Tyrone transformers because they're much, much better, more efficient and only marginally more expensive.
    24:52
    We have our plastics reverse printed by our little shop not far away. Like that. And this is a sheet that they print for us for our playful plastics on PETG or there's lots of different trade names for it. Lexan is a trade name for it, but it's actually PETG. The advantage to that, of course, is that it's flexible. It doesn't snap.
    25:22
    You can't break it. It'll bend, but it won't break. So a ball can hit that and it's not going to snap. That's the difference between PETG and acrylic. Now, it's about double the price of acrylic, so it would be lovely to be able to make it from acrylic, but sadly we can't do that.
    25:39
    Also, that's the back of the playfield, which is, again, it's reverse printed on PETG as well. That's illuminated from behind to spell out the international rescue for this game. And that's a spare piece. For some reason, the Chinese have a strange way of thinking. This is too small for our job. The real one's about that wide. and the lady that does this lays it all out on, she does the laying out on the, ready for the printer so that they're not wasting any space and she did a pretty good job with that sort of thing. But for some reason there was this spot left in the corner and she didn't want to leave it empty so all she did was just shrink the picture and put it in the corner. Okay, that's all great but it's not very much, it's not much use to us. So if anybody wants to make a voluminated box or something to put in their games room, they're welcome to take that. And then that's our laser machine actually cutting those parts out. We've got a couple of laser machines and we cut the parts out and then bag them up in sets really to put on the line so that they can be assembled on the machine. That way we know how many sets we've got. Next part of the process of course was drawings. To come up with a service manual you need drawings and lots of them. mechanical drawings take an immense amount of time. For those of you that are on pin side you may know of one pin side of their Sascha. Sascha Voskoli goes by the name of Zaza I think on the forums and whenever anybody asks any technical question he comes up with the most unbelievable drawings and he's done all the drawings for us. They're quite remarkable, really easy to see, they're amongst the best schematic diagrams I've ever seen in my entire career so we're very happy to have him on board doing that. Some of the issues with China, you know, there's lots of good things, there's always something bad. Here's a toy factory that we had make our models. They made the Mole model, they made the T2 model. We actually had a few 3D ones printed and took them over there. We had the 3D printed make sure they fit where we wanted them to fit, then we took them to the toy factory. That's me explaining to this guy what we wanted and that's the CAD drawing of the up there, we're going through that about the colours, the colours had to be right for the licence owners and all that stuff all the correct Pantone colours and the toy factory was well versed in all of that and that the little aluminium moulds they make That not our product that just something else they were making the day I was there But it a little two aluminium mould and then they put this liquid rubber, it's a weird substance, and then they vulcanise it. So the models are actually soft and pliable. Again, I wanted that rather than something hard because the ball can hit it, it's not going to break it. Some of the problems that we have, that's the drill for the mole. That's the second attempt. The first one you can see that it's obviously a drill. The first one they just put four rings around it. I said well that's no good, we want it to turn. If it was just stationary probably we could have got away with it. But we wanted it to turn. The minute it turned it was obviously not right. I said no, it's got to be a screw. It's got to be a continuous thread. So that was the second attempt. I said look, when I went there, this is the third visit to this factory and I said to the engineer there I said mate you would never get a job in a nut and bolt factory and you know that's what he came up with I said you're telling me this is alright are you serious and sadly they also mucked up our T2 model that was their first attempt on the right I don't know if you can spot the problem and this is after having drawings in front of them and okay, English is not their first language, that's fair enough, but the number two is still backwards as well. So there's no excuse and I said that to the guy, there isn't any excuse, sorry. Yeah, righto. And anyway, they ended up getting it right eventually and the models are good. They're made out of the right stuff, they're the right colours, they've been approved, that all fitted quite well. Something else that probably many of you don't know if you've had a look at the machine, our lockdown bar is actually vacuum formed plastic. I had a lot of trouble, spent a lot of money, wasted a lot of money trying to get dies made to make lockdown bars. It was never to my satisfaction. The corners were never right. It just never looked right. So we ended up experimenting with vacuum forming plastic and the results were quite remarkable. Then we had to make, we made a standard metal plate to go inside and then we had to look for some superior type of glue to put them together and this is testing the glue. We used a rusty old piece of metal and glued it to the front with this special two-pack epoxy and we couldn't pull it off. We were bending the metal, pulling it off and in the end, I didn't get a piece of it, but in the end it actually tore the plastic. The glue itself didn't give. It actually ripped the plastic. So it's quite sturdy and I notice that a lot of people now supply lockdown bars that are actually glued together as well. They're not spot weathered these days. Some wiring harness setups, that's one of the looms for our machine. The girls putting the terminals on the end of the wiring harnesses. It's also, you see some interesting things travelling around China.
    31:15
    We were at a plating place once, picking some stuff up, when one of the staff that was with it, a girl, said, what's that over there, Mike? Look at the building next door. And she's pointing and I'm, what are you talking about? About the second or third floor there was this stuff, something on the second or third floor. And I sort of had to have a closer look and I walked across a bit and went, oh, okay, right, I know what that is. Oh, what is it? What is it? I said, oh, they're blow-up toys. Yeah, but they look like people. What's it all about? What's that all about? So I then had to explain to this 30-year-old woman what this was all about, and she was, like, intrigued. What's that all about, you know? This place was making them, and they would test them in a... Not test them that way.
    32:01
    They would test them in a kid's swimming pool to make sure they were sealed, and then stick them out on the balcony to dry. That was a little bit embarrassing at the time. Some other weird things you see getting around, of course we all know how famous they copy things. Would you like a BMW Angel? Or a Suzuki? There's a lot of that stuff going on. They don't seem to pay much attention to the Angel, for the home market they just don't really care. That's an early drawing of the back glass.
    32:37
    We had a lot of problems. Most of it was okay, but we had a lot of problems with one part of it, and that was Lady Penelope on the left down there. And we thought, oh, they're complaining because she's holding a gun.
    32:51
    And it went backwards and forwards quite a lot. And in the end they said, oh, no, no, we don't care about that because Lady Penelope always had a pistol. That was part of her undercover agent's deal. I said, well, what's the problem? They said, well, she's not beautiful enough. When I first joined, I said, that sort of staggered me a little bit, and I said, you do realise she's not real.
    33:15
    Anyway, in the end, we had to make her a little bit more beautiful, and they were happy with it then. I've also been asked a lot about colour LED or LCD. We have indeed experimented quite a bit with that,
    33:29
    but we just didn't have the resources all the time. You know, we'd run out of time. I'd lost 18 months with Karen's passing and the other staff member losing all of that work. We basically lost all the work he did on the software, by the way, and had to start from scratch. So whilst we had indeed started some of this sort of work, we basically had to drop that and go back to a standard Orange DMV. Now, that's starting to get cranked up. I'm not exactly sure when that picture was taken, but that was probably our first batch of machines coming off the line two or three months ago probably.
    34:09
    Ironing the bugs out as usual, there's always something that's going to bite you and the first batch was pretty good. There wasn't too many crazy things, just a couple of wires out of place. We did have a bit of a problem with white-orange and white-red wire because the first harnesses we made, the colour difference was quite obvious. But then we changed to a new reel of wire and the difference between the red and the orange wasn't so great. So we had a few issues with that. We've since ditched the orange and gone to a different colour. Yellow, I think. But, yeah, that's some of the first machines bundled up. We've got to do something about the packing because it's too big. We can't fit enough in a container. Is that right, Tommy? Yeah.
    34:49
    That's how he gets me to buy more cocktails. Maybe, yeah. Squeeze in the space. That's right. It's probably more profit in there.
    34:59
    Playfield assembly line. Not too many people working there. When we were doing the full run there was quite a few on there. We've only got about seven stations. Unlike Jack's place I see he's got about 50 stations. Unbelievable. You put one screw on and move it on to the next guy. I wish we had the space for that. We don't have that luxury. So each one of our guys has to do half a dozen different jobs. And so far that seems to be working okay. be working okay, the playthroughs came together quite well. And after they come off the end of the line, they go across to the wiring area and the girls attach the wiring harness and get them ready to go in the cabinets. That's half a dozen of them there, ready to go. About two months ago, this is our cramped wood room out the back where we cut all the wood bits and pieces up. The Chinese government started ramping up inspections. They want, well, not the Chinese government, the Shenzhen government, wants factories out of the place. They want to turn the whole city into an IT hub. And they're really hell-bent on getting rid of every factory. So they basically came in and told us their first visit, you can't paint anything anymore. We built a special paint booth with all the right water curtains, the whole bit. No, no, we use green paint. It's water-based. You can drink it. No, we don't care. You're painting, you can't paint, that's it. And there's no arguing with these people. They have no common sense. it's just that's how it is. We've been told nobody can paint, end of story. So it's either stop painting or close the factory, up to you. And that's basically how they did it. So we had no choice but to look for some space and fortunately, and it was completely fluky, that our original factory is only three kilometres from the border of the next city, Don Juan. So we spent a while scampering around over there looking for space that we could lease and we ended up finding a place that fitted the bill where we can actually do our woodwork and assemble the cabinets and paint the cabinets.
    36:59
    Let's talk a little bit more back through the front and onto the painting room out the back. So over the last couple of months we've been slowly moving all of the equipment for all the cutting and everything over there as well. So we now do all the wood cutting and assembly and painting in the second factory in Dog One, bring the box back to the first factory, Assembling stuff is okay. You can screw things together, that's fine, they're happy with that. But you can't use any process, you can't drill any holes, you can't cut any wood, you can't do anything like that. So that's all over at the second factory. We did need more room anyway, so it's not entirely a bad thing. We were really cramped for space in the first place, so that's freed up quite a lot of space in the first factory, which is good because we can devote more to the assembly lines and so on. And basically that's where we're at. Any questions I guess? No? Good.
    38:02
    We've gone to quite a few shows, three or four shows in China where they have a couple of quite large amusement shows and people come from all over the world to buy various redemption games mostly, crane games, that sort of stuff.
    38:17
    And we had, initially we had our tables there, and then we took, to the last Guangzhou show, we took Thunderbirds pinball, and it was quite remarkable actually. Stern also had a display there with three machines.
    38:32
    What came from that is that the Chinese really had no idea what a pinball machine is, at all. They just don't. And on top of that, because they're, well, let's say protected or sheltered if you like, they have no clue what Thunderbirds is, or what Aerosmith is, or ACDC, or Wizard of Oz. They have no idea what those things are. They've never seen them. So they see this machine that's an Aerosmith, and it's a weird machine they've never seen before, they're not interested. They don't know what it is. And then they come and say, how much is it? Ten grand. What? you know, buy, they're not interested because all the other machines there are three grand. And you suddenly hit them with something that's two and a half times the price and they don't even know what it is. We're not taking a chance on that. No way we can buy two or three other machines if we know what they are and we know how much we're going to earn with them.
    39:21
    Yes, we are working on a theme for the Chinese market. And it's an unlicensed theme. And we believe it will also appeal to many in the West as well. I said this in Daventry and a few people took a bit of liberty with what I said, but it's along the lines of, but is not, like Kung Fu. Kung Fu is a Chinese thing, but it's very popular in the West as well in certain areas of the pocket. So it's that type of thing that we believe will appeal to the Chinese as well as some of the West. So we're building it to be bilingual. It'll be Chinese and English. and we still don't know for sure. We've got whitewoods happening, but we still don't know exactly what we're going to do with the finished machine. We might cheapen it right down. We might not have a plywood cabinet. It might be an MDF cabinet. It might be built as cheap as we can to target that market. Or we may make two. We might make that quality cabinet for the West and the MDF cabinet for the Chinese because they are severely price conscious.
    40:26
    We believe they'll come to the shows and look at the machine and go, oh, I know what it is. I don't know what the machine is, but I know what I'm looking at. And they will then hopefully investigate a bit more. That will hopefully be our lead in there. It's also a bit of a mistake to think, I'm going to go to China and sell two billion machines. That's OK if you're selling cans of Coke. You can sell two billion cans of Coke. But not something like this, because the average family lives in an apartment. They don't have houses as we know houses. So that's not the market. The market is arcades and pubs and bars. Pubs and bars, especially Western ones, are springing up everywhere, like hundreds and hundreds of them. So there is a huge market for sure, and they are all hungry for something that's a little bit Western. So a pinball machine fits that bill, especially if it's got a Chinese theme, you're right in, and the price is reasonable. So, yes, we're working on that. Anyone else?
    41:22
    The issue you have with the meeting, that swayed your decision to not paint the plate field and clear coat it and everything like that?
    41:32
    We had already decided to do that, fortunately, because we were actually doing the traditional thing. But the paints and things that you use for that are extremely difficult to get in China. This, as it turns out, I didn't know it at the time, but as it turns out, this was part of their tightening up of all of this stuff. They are going so green, it's not funny. They're going to exceed the rest of the world in a very short period of time because they just decree it and therefore it is done.
    42:01
    You know, we don't like that necessarily, but they say, you can't paint anymore, so suddenly, within 30 days, nobody can do that anymore. That's it. Bang. And if you don comply they just close your doors That it So we had decided for other reasons not to go down that route earlier on but fortunately we did because we would have been in a lot more trouble if we were still using two It just doesn work We barely getting away using AB two glue epoxy They barely allowing that and we got to have all the right MDS and the documents and the paperwork nightmare Yes. Have you thought about some like re-thinning packages then, so that you can pull that plastic off and put down something else? Haven't thought about it, but yes, you can pull it off.
    42:52
    That's an advantage to it. If it should become damaged for some reason, if someone used acetone to clean it, for example, then that could be replaced. It's only a couple of hundred dollars for a new one. Yes, it's a lot of work to pull everything off, but it's not $1,000 for a replacement playfield. It's quite inexpensive. So it's the same amount of work, but without the cost, I guess.
    43:15
    We finished? All gone quiet? Jack has a question. Okay. My question, I don't have a question, but you know, since you brought it up. Yeah. Are you sure those cabinets that you were showing at the Chicago meetings don't look like that? Oh really? Well if they're in China it's possible. Oh they're necessarily on the wall. Really? Just as messy?
    43:52
    Yes. Yes. We're not allowed to do welding anymore, are we? We're going to do that at the other place. I actually gave back the bottles. I sold the bottles back for our... We've got, of course, gas bottles for our big and our TIG. The welding we do in-house is really just prototyping and stuff because once we're happy with it, we get it done outside. It's just we don't have the staff. We've only got 20 staff. So once we've finished prototyping it and we're happy with it, we then get the parts made and we get them welded together outside at bigger places. places but we they're even dubious about us having the bottles for the megan the tea they were really hard on us with the oxy set we have with a satellite and oxygen so I gave up with that and some of the bottles back to the supplier because we couldn't have an oxy certain it's too dangerous this is a factory mind you it's the problem is there's too many careless people there that don't use any common sense in a lot of ways sometimes I had no common sense in these areas and they'll be smoking around the acetylene bottle. As one government document showed, there's a guy using an angle grinder and it's throwing sparks right at the regulator on the acetylene bottle. Like, okay, that's why they make these rules because there's idiots like that. And I guess there's idiots like that everywhere that would do that. It's not just Chinese. So I sold those bottles back and now we've only got two on the wellers. We'll have to take the wells out of the new factory because they won't allow that soon. They're clamping. We get visits from government departments almost weekly.
    45:24
    It'll be the green department this week looking at paint. It'll be the safety department looking for fire next week, and then the fire department itself. And then they just keep coming and coming and coming. It drives me nuts, but it's got to be done. Did I answer your question, Jim? I did, yes.
    45:43
    Hello. Sure, eventually, yes. Right now we're basically making enough for our own use at the moment, but when we get a little bit more organised and we organise our space a bit better, we'll be doing runs of 500 or 1,000 of each of them. Right now we're just doing 100 at a time, there might still be changes, you know, and I don't want to have a thousand up that need changing. We've had a little bit of that, like our ball trough, we improved the front of that and we made a new front plate, but we'd only made about 50 at that time, so it wasn't a huge drama just to change the front plate. Now we know it's right and we know it works perfectly and it ejects the ball exactly how it should and never misses, whereas originally it missed maybe one in 20 or 30 balls or would miss a kick. We thought that's just not right so we kept developing it but now we know it works perfectly we can make 500 of them no problem. Yeah, yeah, yep, yep. And all the timber, cabinet, CNC the machin- the cabinet everything yes. Yeah we do the whole lot. We don't do the heavy metal stuff like pressing the legs there down by our factory outside but we own the die and that's kept at our factory and we give it to them and say make us another thousand legs. No, no, that's also not it. It's a bit special thing and it's very cheap, very cheap outside. It's not worth our while to get involved in that and it takes up too much space. I visited that place quite a lot of times. The printing place is like 20 times this area. It's huge. They're dealing with big sheets. I mean they print this stuff, they don't just print this, they print the full sheet. It's 24, 40, 12, 20 sheets. So the machine is from here to the end of the wall. Seriously, it's massive. And the same with the playfields. They print four, I think, three or four on one sheet. I forget. I think it's four. They can print on one sheet. Then we bring that printed sheet. We actually do the laser cutting ourself, and it's clearly the playfield. They bring it back and we've got two laser machines that take a full sheet and we cut them ourselves because we had a few issues with the accuracy of their cutting. They weren't to the millimetre where I'm a bit fussy, I want it cut to the millimetre. plus or minus nothing. So we do the laser cutting ourselves. That's a pretty easy job. I'm surprised the Green Department hasn't been honest about that. It must be pretty safe to have a laser cutter. I don't know. Some things they seem to overlook. It's pretty weird. There's no rival reason, exactly.
    48:19
    Have we had enough yet? Joe, earlier on at OSPOR, you mentioned helping people who might not be helpful Sure. Are you doing it for people as well? Yeah, I did briefly mention that we had expected, or not expected, but envisaged that some pinball enthusiasts even would come on board and come and give us a hand. Because in the factory really there's only myself who knows what a pinball machine is. Well, no, a lot more people know now because we're building them. But initially even my staff had no idea what a pinball machine was. and basically I bought a getaway and a mate of mine in Brisbane dismantled it and sent it to me in boxes. That big. And I spent a week and a half, two weeks putting it back together. The staff thought I was nuts. They're walking past and here's these wires everywhere. They'd never seen anything like it. And this machine was so worn out.
    49:17
    Springs were hanging, just hanging on bits of metal that were just about worn through. It must have had a billion plays this thing. We actually drew up the design of a heap of parts in the getaway and had them laser cut one part and folded and put in there to make this machine work. But after a couple of weeks I got it going and you're not allowed to bring anything second hand into China by the way. It's illegal. You can't bring anything second hand. Not allowed. At all. That's why it went into boxes that big and we smuggled it in. Don't tell anyone I said that. So we assembled this thing, I got it going, debugged it, it worked pretty well. I bought a big box of LEDs from a company that was pestering me to buy their LEDs and LED'd the whole machine. And then it was interesting that the staff were paying more attention to this thing than they'd ever seen before. So after work, and this is totally unheard of, after work they would stay back and play this machine. And they were quite enthralled by it. So that was encouraging to me that we might be able to convince the Chinese that they should like pinball. And yeah, they stayed back and were playing this thing. And then we started getting closer to the development work with Thunderbirds and we had the basic layout done and we started to put whiteboards together. And I would tell one of the staff, look, just check that and we'll put it here, whatever it might be. So they'd run over the getaway, measure that. No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not copying that.
    50:45
    They all thought, that's what we're making. This. Not for Bob. No. Now, we're making a machine like that machine, but not that machine. Hmm. Well, it was hard to convince them. But anyway, they do understand a lot more now. And they do like it, and that's good. And that's good for everybody, because if we can get the Chinese interested in pinball, well, you know, the sky's the limit for all of us, because it opens up a whole lot more possibilities. And once something's in the marketplace there, at a reasonable price, then they might open up and look a little bit wider and go, hey, this is not a bad thing, we'll spend a bit more money on that. And it might then make your machine available, your machines available, who knows. Gary's been trying to crack that market for quite some time, and as far as I can tell, with extremely limited success. We've had machines out in some bars there on test over the last year, various locations on and off, and with reasonable results actually. The most popular one was in a Canadian expat bar called The Brew in Guangzhou. I've got to go there when I go back actually. It met with quite a lot of success there. It was a pretty early version so we did have some problems with it, but they were pretty happy with it. But it was mainly expats that were playing it, not so much Chinese. But they would have been exposed to it as well by actually being in the bar. from ITV as the owner of the license in London. It's just a matter of applying to them, telling them what you want to do. And, you know, initially they were quite reluctant to even discuss things with me because who was I? I had no factory.
    52:31
    I had never worked for a pinball company. Why should they take a chance and give me this license? And I basically convinced them that, yes, this is what my intention was. I have got 10 years' experience trading in China. I have got experience in pinball machines. I believe we can do it. And they said, fair enough. Well, you can give us a nice, big, juicy bond, and we'll give you the licence, which I did. And then development initially was very slow because I had an empty factory. I had to fill it and get people and train people. And from every nut and bolt, every spanner in that shop, I've had to buy. and put in there. I didn't take over somewhere that was ready to go. I couldn't just go down to the hardware store and buy a spanner because they didn't know what I was talking about. And so everything had to come into the factory and, you know, that took time. Longer than I thought, of course. People complained to me that it's taken you five years to get to market. I can't do that by saying 18 months and that was lost. And 18 months that I had no control over and I can't get that 18 months back. So by the calendar it's five years, sure but in reality to me it's three and a half years. That's too long too, I'm the first to admit that. They were happy to do it on the basis that I gave them a chunky deposit but of course when all these problems came along I had to extend the licence. They were exceptionally compassionate and very, very helpful. They understood completely and they've been quite helpful actually all the way down the line and they're very happy. I took a machine to Daventry recently and I went to Daventry in England basically. The only reason I went there really was because that machine, by my contract, I had to give them one machine. And so I thought, hey, there's a show on, let's take the machine to the show, show people and then I can take it to them and kill two birds with one stone, excellent, get some value out of it. So I went there, got to the show and they had moved their offices to some small temporary place. They said, oh, we haven't got anywhere to put that now, sorry, we're I'm just going to donate it to a charity that runs auctions and that auction it off was on. Thanks very much. I've just come to England to meet you and install it and here we are at the end of the project and it didn't happen. So it was a waste of trip in a way, except I got to meet Jonathan. I'm glad you're here. Have we had enough? Are we ready for a beer yet or? Yeah, no, you're right.
    55:05
    Japanese market? Yeah, sure, there's some market there. I'm not sure how big it is. Jack would have a better idea than me. I don't think it's as big as we think. During this project, when I started this project, there was actually a Thunderbird-themed cafe in Japan, in Tokyo, and they'd been going for a long time, like 15 years, and sadly they've closed now. That would have been one sale anyway.
    55:33
    If anybody wants these bits of plastic, feel free to grab them. Okay. Yours. Only if you put LEDs behind it.
    55:45
    Done. I've got a few little things here if you would like them on your way out or if you're not going out, if you're staying for Jack's talk, Jack will be on soon. He probably wants to have a bit of a break first. no yeah exactly and we can round up a few more people ok thanks for coming along and happy I hope you learned a little bit about some of the trials and tribulations I've had