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#137 A new Day - The Classic Pinball Podcast

The Classic Pinball Podcast·podcast_episode·1h 35m·analyzed·Feb 17, 2026
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.033

TL;DR

Dave recounts a Fun House playfield swap using 3D printing for missing parts; discusses flipper mechanism upgrades and maintenance.

Summary

Dr. Dave and Dr. John Day discuss recent pinball restoration projects, focusing on playfield swaps. Dave describes his challenging Fun House playfield swap—his first swap where he didn't disassemble the original playfield himself—and how he used 3D printing to fabricate missing parts (spacers, nylon liners) rather than waiting for replacements. They also discuss John's 8-Ball Deluxe restoration, flipper mechanism upgrades (WPC conversions vs. Mata Hari rebuilds), and the importance of properly tightening flipper linkages during maintenance.

Key Claims

  • D. Macy has done extensive Fun House playfield swaps and posted detailed documentation on Pinside

    high confidence · Dr. Dave references D. Macy's detailed Pinside thread documenting a Fun House swap, praising his work and noting they've met at Pintastic and Allentown events

  • WPC flipper coils running at 43 volts (Bally standard) instead of their rated 50 volts results in appropriately powered flippers

    high confidence · Dr. John Day explains WPC coils are too powerful at full voltage, so running them at the lower Bally voltage works 'perfectly'

  • Flipper link bushings are often shipped loose from factories and should be tightened down during maintenance

    high confidence · Both speakers agree that tightening the bronze bushing on flipper links prevents wear and extends service life; they credit Alan with teaching them this

  • CPR playfields have more robust wood than recent Merco playfields and often require pre-drilling when installing screws

    medium confidence · Dr. John compares the wood quality and density between CPR and Merco playfields based on his restoration experience

  • Fun House has four solenoids inside Rudy that move the eyes up/down and left/right in an easily reversible assembly

    high confidence · Dr. Dave describes the Rudy mechanism in detail, noting he assembled it incorrectly multiple times before getting it right

  • Recent WPC flipper parts from China use different metal that loosens after installation, becoming effectively single-use

    medium confidence · Dr. John notes he's had to revisit flipper rebuilds where previously tight parts have become loose, requiring over-tightening on reinstall

  • Modern Stern flipper mechanisms are superior to both WPC and vintage Bally mechanisms for robustness and longevity

    medium confidence · Both speakers agree modern Stern flippers are 'probably some of the best out there' and more robust than WPC alternatives

  • Dr. Dave purchased his 8-Ball Deluxe project game at Allentown for $1,200, significantly cheaper than the $2,000-4,000 range in other markets

Notable Quotes

  • “I said on the conference call, this is the best part, I said, I have a personal emergency. I need to get off the phone.”

    Dr. John Day @ approx. 12:00-13:00 — Humorous anecdote about the urgency of securing a vintage 8-Ball Deluxe on the secondhand market; illustrates the passion of the collector community

  • “It's like Star Trek. Make your own part with the replicator.”

    Dr. John Day @ approx. 35:00 — Enthusiastic response to Dr. Dave's use of 3D printing to fabricate missing Fun House parts; highlights technology innovation in restoration

  • “I explored all 20 different ways of doing it wrong before I finally got it right.”

    Dr. Dave @ approx. 30:00 — Emphasizes the complexity of reassembling Rudy without prior reference materials; demonstrates problem-solving in restoration

  • “The bushing prevents the bind. That's what it's there for.”

    Dr. John Day @ approx. 45:00 — Clarifies misconception about over-tightening flipper linkage bushings; technical expertise on mechanical tolerances

  • “It's a multi-layer cake, a fudge cake.”

    Dr. Dave @ approx. 50:00 — Descriptive critique of Merco playfield construction with excessive adhesive between layers; relates to wood quality concerns

  • “Just the smile on her face when she was playing, I was like, oh, I should leave this up for her.”

    Dr. John Day @ approx. 26:00 — Personal anecdote about setting up Fun House for his wife Maureen; shows emotional/social dimensions of the hobby beyond technical restoration

  • “It's not this irreversible thing or anything like that.”

    Dr. Dave @ approx. 48:00 — Reassurance about WPC flipper conversions being reversible, encouraging experimentation in restoration

Entities

Dr. DavepersonDr. John DaypersonD. MacypersonMaureenpersonFast EddiepersonBrianperson8-Ball DeluxegameFun Housegame

Signals

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Dr. Dave successfully used 3D printing (PETG material) to fabricate multiple missing specialty parts for a Fun House playfield swap, including insulating spacers for Rudy solenoids and nylon eye liners, completing restoration in days rather than waiting for supply chain

    high · Within less than five minutes, he had drawn up the CAD file for that special spacer...I basically miked out all of the dimensions of what the nylon liner should be...I drew those up in CAD and then printed them myself

  • ?

    product_concern: WPC flipper parts sourced from China in recent years use different metal that loosens significantly after installation, requiring over-tightening and becoming effectively single-use rather than reusable

    medium · I've found I had to go back a couple of times...The flipper has now moved...They've been using one-time use...They're almost closed at the end

  • $

    market_signal: Allentown pinball market offers significantly better pricing on vintage machines than other regions; Dr. John Day purchased a project 8-Ball Deluxe for $1,200 that would sell for $2,000-4,000 elsewhere

    high · I bought an 8-Ball Deluxe...I paid for $1,200 there...That's a steal...the market for selling used games, used parts, things like that is hot now

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Long-form technical discussion revealing community preferences: modern Stern flippers preferred for robustness over WPC; WPC preferred over Bally linear mechanisms for classic game conversion; different coil colors (blue/red/yellow/green) provide different power levels for different applications

    high · I think the modern Stern flippers are probably some of the best out there...the advantage of the WPC is you can make it more powerful...the blues were too powerful...the reds are perfectly balanced

Transcript

groq_whisper · $0.287

0:00
Dr. Dave and Dr. John Day snowblower routine than the last episode where I came in with the snowblower situation. Yeah, that particularly rang to me because you and I both live in the same town, so we both had to deal with similar amounts of snow. We got clobbered. The clobber was snow. Absolutely. So, yeah, yeah. So it's good that that's passed at least so we can get back to some more fun things. Back to more pinball. Exactly. More boxing pinball. So what's been up with you with pinball shenanigans that you've been up to lately? What's projects or things you've been doing lately? Yeah, yeah. So I always say I really enjoy playfield swaps. So I've been doing quite a few of those lately. And the most recent one was a fun house, which was kind of interesting. So I had a friend that had purchased a Merco playfield probably maybe five years ago, maybe a little longer than that. Okay. And, you know, he had the intent of doing a swap. and then he did a total tear down, cleaned everything up, cleaned the wiring harness and cleaned up all the necks and stuff like that. And then did a good job kind of binning all the parts and getting some new parts that needed replacement. But he never got around to reassembling it. And so the game's kind of been in a disassembled state for many years. So he reached out to me and said, hey, would you mind doing the swap? And I'll join you. It would be fun for him to kind of work with me on it. So I set up a gig where I didn't have – this is the first time I've done a swap where I didn't have the original play field like where I took it apart myself. And you have that muscle memory of how it goes together. Yeah, exactly. It's like experience. You just did it a little while ago. It's like, okay, I know what I did. Yeah. And now you're coming in blind. Right, right. So you know that. Every time you walk up to a game, I'm sure you visually remember how stuff goes together. You probably don't even have to take pictures of it or whatever. I still do just to get some insurance, Paul. That's a smart one. You've got to have a little bit of insurance there. Yeah, I tend to do that too, even though I'll usually remember it. But I'm with you on that. I take pictures. You can always delete it. Right, exactly. Anyway, so I didn't have that memory. But he had some really good photos. And more importantly, there was a really good thread on Pinside from D. Macy. Oh, yeah, Macy. Yeah, D. Macy. Yeah, so real props to him. So he had done a Funhaus swap. He does a lot of swaps. He's done some really nice work. He did, yeah. He does some really nice work. And I don't know him personally. I'd love to meet him. I've hung out with him at, let's see, Pintastic for a while. Oh. And also at Allentown. Oh, you need to. Him and, yeah, him and Gary. Not Gary. What the hell is his name? Shoot, I'm losing his name. I'll think of his name in a second. Jerry. Oh, Jerry. Oh, I know Jerry. Yeah, him and Jerry, they're like two peas in a pod. Oh, I don't know if I know D. Macy, but I would love to meet him. So at Pintastic, if you don't mind. But they stopped going to Pintastic since Pintastic moved farther away to Marlborough. They were going to Sturbridge, but it's like, no, we can't go any further than Sturbridge. So now I see them at Allentown. Have you been to Allentown yet? I have not made it there yet. Oh, you've got to go to Allentown. It's on my radar, so it needs to happen. Especially for the farmer's market. It's a whole experience. Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. Plus, also, I understand the market for selling used games, used parts, things like that is pretty hot now. I'll say, especially a couple years ago,

high confidence · Dr. John recalls buying his project 8-Ball Deluxe at Allentown and notes the used game market there is 'hot'

Flash Gordon
game
Meteorgame
Gorgargame
Fathomgame
Centaurgame
Atari Pinballgame
Doctor Whogame
Terminator 2game
Pinsideorganization
Pintasticevent
Allentownevent
Steve Ungperson
Sterncompany
Williamscompany
Ballycompany
Mercocompany
CPRcompany
  • ?

    operational_signal: Critical maintenance technique: flipper linkage bushings should be tightened down fully during service to prevent loose play and bushing wear; contrary to factory defaults and some technician misconceptions, proper tightening does not cause binding

    high · tighten that right down as much as you can...They're always loose. People don't tighten them down...you can't reuse them...You wouldn't get play in that if it would last a lot longer

  • ?

    community_signal: Pinside forum documentation of technical restoration work (D. Macy's Fun House swap thread) serves as critical reference material for restorers; high-quality photographic documentation enables others to replicate complex work without hands-on experience

    high · there was a really good thread on Pinside from D. Macy...He had done a Fun House swap...more importantly, there was a really good thread on Pinside...photos were excellent...I spent a lot of time studying those

  • ?

    venue_signal: Pintastic pinball event relocated from Sturbridge to Marlborough, resulting in reduced attendance from some enthusiasts (D. Macy, Jerry) who prefer not to travel further; Allentown has become replacement primary venue

    medium · Pintastic moved farther away to Marlborough...They were going to Sturbridge, but it's like, no, we can't go any further than Sturbridge...they stepped going to Pintastic since Pintastic moved farther away

  • ?

    restoration_signal: CPR playfield reproductions noted as superior to Merco in wood robustness and quality; Merco playfields exhibit excessive adhesive layers between wood plies and softer wood requiring less pre-drilling; CPR requires standard pre-drilling

    medium · CPR wood is excellent...Really, really good luck with that...this Merco was...much thicker glue layers...CPR might break a screw...with this one, the wood is a little bit softer

  • ?

    gameplay_signal: Fun House gameplay creates mixed reactions: overly complex shot sequences and constant obstructions frustrate some players, but the Rudy animatronic interaction (hitting in mouth, responding with sounds/animation) provides engaging feedback and appeal

    medium · There's too much of this stuff. It's all in the way all the time...you can't take this shot here...But I do like hitting Rudy in the mouth...it's fun when he's going crazy...he's shouting and yelling at you

  • ?

    technology_signal: 3D printing and CAD design becoming practical tools for pinball restoration; allows rapid iteration and fabrication of specialty parts without waiting for supply chain; enables restorers to overcome missing part barriers and complete projects faster

    high · within less than five minutes, he had drawn up the CAD file...printed it, printed two copies. They fit perfectly...five minutes, drew it up, printed it, and we had two nylon liners made out of PETG...I drew those up in CAD and then printed them myself

  • ?

    industry_signal: Specialized technical knowledge about flipper mechanisms, coil voltage management, and maintenance best practices is concentrated among community experts but not universally known; some industry figures (like Alan) are credited with pioneering best practices

    medium · Very few people know about...I heard Alan had put that on my radar many years ago...And there were other people in the pinball restoration biz who would argue with both of us about it

    • 3:44
    you could buy games so much cheaper there. I bought an 8-Ball Deluxe, a project sort of game that would go for, anyway, $2,000, $3,000, $4,000 here. I paid for $1,200 there. Oh, that's a steal. Yeah, yeah. I paid a lot more than that for my totally dead project. Yes, right here. For the rash play field, 8 Ball Deluxe. But look at it now. It's a pretty gorgeous game you have. Oh, thank you. Yeah, yeah. I absolutely adore it. So, you know, it's a game. Well, it's your Brittany is what motivated me to get that. You know, when I went over your house and met Brittany for the first time. For those of you who are in the podcast that don't know, Dave has named his 8 Ball Deluxe Brittany. and found a clever place to put a photo of Britney Spears in the artwork, which is kind of cool. And I don't know if you've ever disclosed that to anyone. Yeah, I probably haven't. So that Britney, I got some kind of, I don't know, perfume thing in the mail, the Britney Spears collection perfume thing. This was from years ago, I don't know, 15, 20 years ago. And it was like Britney perfume. It was 18-year-old Britney on the thing there, and a little flyer or something that's like, you know this is just about the right color i think it's it was sort of a black and white a sepia tone color britney spears thing and she's kind of posing a little bit not scantily clad at all it was a classy shot and you know cut her out and i put her over uh right below ball and play and credits there's a woman there with a guy with their arm around each other i put britney right there it blends in perfectly and it looks great so it's what's called let's play some britney Yeah, it's fantastic. It really is. It always cracked me up when I noticed that. It's subtle. It's very subtle. I didn't realize that it was a modification of the back glass until you pointed it out. It just looks like it belongs there. It's pretty funny. Thank you. The tone and all that, the size of her and the tone and color tone and all that stuff really matches the rest of the EBD artwork. Yeah, as soon as I saw that, it's like, that's where it's going to go. It's pretty funny. It always cracks me up. A little upgrade. Anyway, so after playing your Bitry or Brittany, it was kind of a game changer for me, playing this pristine 8-ball deluxe that, A, it's just such a great game to begin with. Originally, I was a kid playing it, and then to play your copy that was perfect, I'm like, I need to get one of these. So I was on a mission. You might recall that. Yeah, I remember. You were on a mission. Yes. To find one. Actually, finding that game was kind of a funny story. So now I guess that I'm retired, I can disclose it. So I was at work. I was on a conference call at work. And one of my friends, Brian, texted me. He knew I was looking for Nate Valtellos, the original. And he texted me and said, hey, someone just posted one on Pinside. And I was literally in a conference call at work. And I said on the conference call, this is the best part, I said, I have a personal emergency. I need to get off the phone. And I will get back to you in like 10 minutes. And so I did. I dropped the call. Did you say pinball emergency or personal emergency? I just said personal. Okay, I would have said pinball. I thought pinball might have gone a little too far. Sure. So I went on Pinside and saw the ad. It had been posted like minutes before and responded to the seller. And then he and I went back and forth. I gave him my cell phone. I said, look, send me some pictures. They'll show it up right away. And then he and I negotiated a price, get it picked up. And he told me within the seven minutes that he and I were negotiating back and forth, talking. He said he got like 10 other people that had posted to him. So I was super excited. I used Fast Eddie. Oh, Fast Eddie. Yes. Back in the day. So the game was located in New Jersey, and I didn't really have a good way of picking it up at the time. It was the dead of winter. So he had suggested having Fast Eddie deliver it, which was a great suggestion. So I got a chance to meet a pinball legend. Yeah. So Fast Eddie showed up the next day. The game was all wrapped up like in a cocoon. Mummified. Yeah, mummified. It was beautiful. So the game was really rough. The play field was all rashed. It barely played. So it's all good. That's what I expected when I was buying it. And so that was my first Playfield swap, actually. Wow, all right. Way back in 2018 or 2017. So that was great. You did some special modifications to the flippers, I heard. I did, yeah. So that's sort of a joke between Dave and I. So if anyone has ever worked on an Apol Deluxe or maybe a Fathom or Centaur or some of those games of those era, you'll notice the flippers are linear. So they have this big, very, very heavy plunger. and then there's this crank arm with like a nylon bushing that sort of rides inside of a slot. And, you know, the nylon bushing kind of wears out and adds play. The plunger is very heavy, so it makes the flipper feel very clunky. And so those flippers are, you know, not great playing in the end. Right, exactly, agreed. And so anyway, so when the 8-Ball Deluxe had arrived, you know, the flippers like barely work. You know, the coils were all, like, burned and mangled. Flippers barely worked. I mean, again, I knew the game was going to be really rough. Sure. And, you know, the plates were kind of stripped out and stuff like that. And I was like, pinball life, you know, Terry sells, like, complete WPC mechanisms. No, wait. No. You know, don't tell me. Oh, I know. Go ahead. So I have quite a few WPC games, you know, WPC 89s and 95s. And 95s, I'm really fond of those era games. And I love the flipper mechs. I'm sorry, Dave, but I do. I feel from an engineering point of view. I love them, too, in Williams games from the 80s and 90s. They're great. But I do feel from an engineering point of view that they're, like, I just love the way you can adjust them. You know, the nuts don't get, you know, the Allen bolts don't get stuck in the flippers. And they get stuck at a certain angle. You can infinitely adjust them in the future. And, you know, they're just so robust. And, you know, the parts are inexpensive. and easy to service. Anyway, I'm just a big fan of those things. So anyways, I priced out rebuilding the EBD ones that I had, the original Mexican version. With the plunger link situation or the old school Mata Hari? Yeah, well, had I done it, I would have done what you had recommended, which is to change to the old school Mata Hari style. And that's a great upgrade. And I have done that on several other games I've restored over the years. And I think that's a really good path to take. and I could have done that on this game. Right. But the plates were kind of stripped out on it, and the coils were bad. But did you know at that point, actually, those left and right plates can be swapped around and reused? You had told me that, and I don't know that I thought of that at the time. So maybe I didn't know it or didn't think of it. But they were stripped out, so maybe they could have been reused. But still, the end of stroke switches were bad. I had the coils were really, I didn't want to reuse the coils. They were really like mangled. They had some burns in them. And so I was already going to have to do EOS, bushings, coils. And I felt the plates, but you're probably right. I probably could have flipped them over. That's a good suggestion. So anyway, so I looked at the parts or whatever. And Terry at the time had the WPC mechs for like $40 complete with a new coil and everything. And now it goes to a much beefier coil. Like those WPC coils are like big time. But the coil voltage for those versus the Bally, is it different? Yes, it is. Yeah, yeah. So you'll notice the coil voltage on WPCs is rated at 50 volts and the Ballys are 43. Correct. So you're running a 50-volt coil only at 43, which turns out is kind of perfect because the WPC coils are, frankly, too powerful. Too much. They're too powerful for these classic games. So it turned out to work out great. I had read about someone on Pinside. I think it was Vid1900. I think he had suggested at one time putting WPC mechs in a classic game. He wasn't saying you should always do it. Right, it's an option. He just pointed it out as an option. Yeah. And that stuck with me after reading about that. And I felt, at least with EVD, that from a cost point of view, it was going to be neutral. Right. And I'd get brand new coils and better coils. You say neutral to going for the Mata Hari style, the same effect? Yeah, yeah, exactly. If I looked at replacing the pawls and the plunger and replacing the coil springs and the stroke switch, by the time I added up all those parts, it was basically the same as the complete WPC mech. And now I've got what I felt was a superior mechanism that would be easier to maintain in the future. And I will say lately, so that mech and that WPC style has been great for a while. Well, over the past couple of years, I think there's been parts out of China or whatever or different metal they're using. And I've found I had to go back a couple of times to different clients where I've done a whole flip rebuild. And I crank those things down pretty good. I just don't crank them all the way down. You're supposed to leave a little bit of something there. That's right. The little clamshell deal. And, hey, you were just here a week ago and the flipper has now moved. It's now up. Oh, that's so frustrating. So it's like this. I cranked it down my usual. So now I have to go back and really crank these things down a lot more. Like, really, you can't use them again. Yeah, yeah. They've been being one-time. One-time use, which sucks. And they're closed. They're almost closed at the end, yeah. And I will say nowadays, I really like Stern's situation better. Yeah, I agree. In modern Stern, it's way more robust. A nice, big, heavy thing there. And that grabs that thing, and you can reuse that thing over and over again. Yep, yep, I agree. I think the modern Stern flippers are probably some of the best out there. They've come a long way because they weren't as good years. Now they're great. Agreed. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree that that crank arm is better on a modern stern than a WPC. It's true. Maybe that's what I should put on my Meteor when I do it. Oh, yeah. Instead of mine. You know what? It's a stern. So that would go. I had not thought of that. You know what? I think I can authorize that. I might consider doing that. 48 volt. That would probably work. Now we're talking. Oh, you got the gears cranking now. I don't know. I might do that on Meteor when I do the swap on that just for fun. I like it. You know, I'm okay with that. I'm at peace with that one. All right. Yeah, but I felt like for a Bally, you can't really put a Stern mech in it. I have to put a, you know, Bally Williams mech, and, you know, WPC is Bally Williams, you know. Yeah, okay. Okay, all right. Nice of you going there. All right. So, but, yeah, no, it's really, you know, like you said, you know, you can, I've had several games that I've done the Mata Hari rebuild on, and the game plays great, so no issues. I think, you know, it's just a matter of personal choice. the advantage of the WPC is you can make it more powerful you can put like a 629 is it 630 or 629 I think it's 29 the blue coil you can put one of those there and the ball will smash off the glass every time you launch it I think the standard one is the orange or the red I do red is the one I've experimented, I did blues originally I even have some greens too greens are weaker I think that's for like upper flipper that's going to hit some stuff. Yeah. So I did blues originally because I was concerned about, you know, 50 volts going down to 43. I was like, maybe the flippers are going to be a little too weak. And so I went with blue rather than reds. Okay. And the blues were too powerful. Okay. I mean, they really were. I mean, they were just so strong. So I did end up swapping them out for reds. And the reds are great. The reds are perfectly balanced for a game like EBD or Flash Gordon or which of the two games that I have that I've converted to WPCs. I have used WPCs, the ones from Pinball Life, the whole assembly there.
    15:20
    I've used a yellow coil, and it's more like from the late 80s stuff. You know what I mean, that style? Oh, yeah, yeah. And I've used that really great success in Atari Pinball. Oh, yeah. It works great. Oh, that's great, yeah, yeah. Because their stuff... That's good to know. Because the Atari stuff sucked, and you can't find it anyway. You don't want to reuse any of that stuff. You don't want to reuse it. It's all sloppy and junky, and you can't get new anyway, It's like going to the Williams stuff, it has the right feel. The feel feels good. It feels normal. It feels just powerful enough. So no brainer there. And also with classic Williams stuff, System 3 to System 7, especially System 3 to 6, that stuff is kind of junky for the most part. You can rebuild it, but it's kind of a little sloppy. Putting the WPC in those is a game changer. Yeah, yeah. I did many Gorgars. I've done with those and had great success with that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's something, you know, it's kind of personal taste, I guess, more than anything. I mean, it's fun. You and I always jab back and forth about the WPC stuff. I think it's really fun. I did put WPC, like, flippers in so the games don't have the fat ass. Now you've gone too far. You know, so it's got the narrow backs from a WPC game. You're killing it. Or in my games as well. Yeah, yeah. So it's got that look to it, you know. But, I mean, you can always convert it back. Yeah, sure. It's not a big deal. It's not this irreversible thing or anything like that. I'm hoping to throw those plates out, the Valley plates out. I kept them. Because I think you had told me about that, or it hit my radar about reversing them later on. So I did keep the plates. So I feel like if I ever sell the game, I'll give the plates to whoever bought the game, and they could convert it back if they wanted to or whatever. The other key thing about WPC Flipper Mechs and even the modern Stern Flipper Mechs that very few people know about, I think it's starting to catch on a little bit, but every time I go in to do a day spot on a game and that kind of thing and refurb it, PM it, But I'll look, and you actually, you're supposed to be able to tighten that paw down, that little thing there. The crank arm. Yeah. Tighten that right down as much as you can. Not the crank arm for where the flipper's going, but more for like the, what is it called? The flipper link. The flipper link with the little bushing in there. Mm-hmm. Little bronze bushing. Oh, yeah, yeah. Those are always loose. They're always loose. That's true, yeah. And the problem is, they're always loose. People don't tighten them down, and they want to, I'm just going to replace the whole thing over and over again after a thousand places. So they don't have to. If they cranked them down in the first place, they'd be nice and tight for a long time. You wouldn't get play in that flip if it would last a lot longer. So I find whenever I'm putting them in, I crank them down, and then they last for a good long time, and I don't have to go and rebuild them for a while. Yeah, that's excellent advice. Actually, I heard Alan had put that on my radar many years ago. Yeah, years ago. Same here. He was spot on. I wasn't aware of it. I was like, well, come on, from the factory, they must be tightening it to spec. And nope, they are not necessarily tight. In fact, back in the day, Alan and I were on the same page with that, too, and we both talked about it. And there were other people in the pinball restoration biz who would argue with both of us about it. Like, no, no, it's going to bind. And we both said, no, it's not going to bind. We do it all the time. It does not bind. Because the bushing prevents that. The bushing prevents the bind. That's what it's there for. Yeah, it can't bind. You're actually seeing that bushing into the metal, and you're crushing it down so it's in there nice and it's solid. And it doesn't have a chance to loosey-goosey move around. It's actually bad for it because once it's loose, then the bushing wears against the screw and stuff like that, and it gets more loose. Yeah, the screw gets all – It gets feed on itself, and then the screw gets messed up. Exactly. It's terrible. It wants to be tight. Yep. So that's really good advice. So getting back to Funhaus. Yes, Funhaus, yes. So yeah, so it was a really – it was definitely the most challenging swap I've ever done for a couple of reasons. One is having not taken the game apart in the first place, and I don't own the title. So the only other fun house that I really had played was your wife's copy. Okay, yeah. Maureen's copy. Nice. Which is a beautiful copy, by the way. But given it's not a classic, you don't have it on legs all the time, so I don't get to visit it very often. I just had it on. I just had it on legs for about a week. And it was so nice to see a smile on her face because she doesn't really bug me to set it up. Yeah. I say, well, if I set it up for you, are you going to play it? Well, I'll play it when you're here. I'll play it with you. It's like, okay, but I'm not going to play it that much because I'm not a big Pat Lawler fan. There's too much of this stuff. It's all in the way all the time. The shots are all blocked. You can't take this shot here. You've got to go around this way and back this. It's always a combination to do something. So it's not really my thing. But I do like hitting Rudy in the mouth. Yeah, it is fun. Ow!
    19:52
    It's fun when he's going crazy when you're having multiple. He's going, ah! He's shouting and yelling at you. So that's kind of fun. I don't know. But when I saw her first playing after a set-up after many years, just the smile on her face, she was having so much fun. It's like, oh, wow, she's really enjoying this game. It's like, I should leave this up for her. So I even told her, it's like, I really want to take it down. I've got to put another game up here to work in the shop.
    20:16
    But she's like, oh, you can take it down. It's like, yeah, but I don't really want to. You're having such a good time with it. I'll leave it on a couple more days for you. Then I'll leave it over here in the corner. We'll set it back up again soon.
    20:26
    But it's just like, we need a bigger house. You do. I mean, your place is fabulous here. You've got enough room for all these games.
    20:34
    I'm envious of your room you have for games. Oh, thanks. Hey, I tried to get you to move down the street. Remember that house that was for sale over on Stern? Was it on Stern Road, I think, or no? It was next to Morrissey. Okay. Stern Road would have been kind of nice. Yeah, that would have been perfect, actually. Going from Arcadia to Stern. That would be perfect. There are houses for sale every now and then. You've got to come to my neighborhood. I'd love to have you as a neighbor. Sounds good. Okay.
    20:56
    So, yeah, yeah. So, that fun house. So getting back to that fun house was pretty interesting. So I didn't, you know, your copy actually wasn't on legs at the time I was doing the swap. So I didn't really have a game to reference. Fortunately, the D. Macy, you know, photos were excellent. So I spent a lot of time studying those. But the game came in, like, as the classic, like, parts game. Like, literally, you know, my friend came over with about a dozen bins full of parts that were all just random. Here, you figure it out. Yeah, you know. But it was really helpful. He was there to work with me on it, so he had a lot of questions about some of the parts. And he said, oh, yeah, I think I've got that part here, or, oh, I don't remember. So it was really fun. We had a lot of fun working together. That's the first time I've done a swap with someone else sort of to help out.
    21:45
    So I think he had a lot of fun doing it as well. But it's interesting. We ran into a situation with Rudy and a few other situations where we did not have the parts. There's a lot of specialty parts inside that. And especially Rudy. It's like you're building a clock almost. And we're at the end, right? Yeah. So the play field's actually done and the play field's in the game and we left Rudy for last. And we tested everything out without Rudy and then we're doing Rudy on the bench or whatever. And then there's, if you know inside Rudy, there's like four solenoids that oppose each other that basically move the eyes up and down and allow them to go left and right. It's a very clever mechanism. It is. about 20 different ways to assemble it incorrectly. Right. And so I explored all 20 different ways of doing it wrong before I finally got it right. Oh, wow. Yeah, because you didn't have any plan or reference. I didn't have any reference. Yeah. It's got that weird ratcheting thing. And the solenoid has to be, that has to be facing in one direction. And anyway, I had it backwards originally. And you figure it out eventually. So, but what was interesting is like we didn't have, two of the solenoids are right up against like the metal cage. So from the factory, they had like a spacer for an insulating plate that's on the sides. Could not find those. And we just want to get this thing done. Right. So my friend's really into 3D printing, as I am too. And he's really good at 3D CAD and all that kind of stuff. So I just like tell him what to do. And within less than five minutes, he had drawn up the CAD file for that special spacer. And then, like, took five minutes, printed it, printed two copies. They fit perfectly. That's awesome. Was that awesome? That's a great skill. That's awesome. You can make your own. It's like Star Trek. Make your own part with the replicator. It was amazing. And then we ran into, you know how the eyes have those niliners? You know, the eyes. You're familiar with the niliners. Yeah, yes. And we couldn't find those. And so the eyes were all loose because we didn't have the nyliner. Steve Ung has those, right? Steve Ung has a whole selection of those We do but you got to order it We had a couple days and we were pretty excited Both of us kind of wanted to get the game done and completed So I basically miked out all of the dimensions of what the Nyliner should be Same thing, five minutes, drew it up, printed it, and we had two Nyliners made out of P-Tag-G. It worked perfectly, and the eyes worked perfectly. When I was doing the ramps, there's a bunch of these weird spacers that you have to hold the ramps. The ramps are pretty complicated on that game. And we had brand new ramps and had to, you know, some of the spacers were missing. And so I didn't have them. And so I drew those up in CAD and then printed them myself, you know, in black. And boom, I've got the spacers I need and I can move the project forward. So I think, you know, that funhouse is the first time that I integrated 3D printing in, you know, doing a restoration, where there's a missing part or something that we need. So that was kind of a cool thing to do. How did you find it?
    24:51
    So my Merco play field, my fun house, was one of the first ones they did. I think you commented on it that they did better play field wood back in that day than today's Merco. Yeah, yeah. Yours is really nice. I can tell when you look at the shooter lane on yours, your shooter lane looks nice.
    25:08
    I'm not crazy about play fields that have a lot of adhesive. between the layers between the layers um and i you know people can debate this so i'm you know but i'm i'm really into woodworking myself right and i'm of the opinion and everybody can have their own opinion it's all good but i i personally prefer wood with you know that is a lot more wood you know solid wood layers and less you know really obvious glue right um and um unfortunately this merco was a more recent one and so you know you could tell it had you know much thicker glue layers. So when you look in the shooter lane, you know, you see all these arches, you see all the glue arches that are very dark and, you know, very obvious. It's like a multi-layer cake, a fudge cake. Yeah, whatever. And I could also tell, because I've done, a lot of the other play fields I've done were CPRs. Yeah. And the CPR wood is excellent. You know, I've had really, really, really good luck with that. And I could tell when you were like tightening it in, the wood was definitely, at least of this generation of Mirko was definitely not as robust.
    26:15
    You're not going to break a screw. A CPR might break a screw. Yeah, CPRs, you've got to pre-drill those usually because otherwise you're risking breaking a screw. But with this one, I did pre-drill most of them just out of habit. But you could have gotten away without it because it would have probably still been okay because the wood is a little bit softer. But everything held. It was fine. And the game played great. In the end, it looked great. The artwork was really beautiful on the game. It played great. It plays really, really well. So it looks great. I mean, hey, it took a game that was very, very tired and kind of a very ugly play field, and now it's all new, and it's like it came out of the factory. So it's good. Did you do no decals to the cabinet? The cabinet was pretty nice on that game. Yeah, yeah. I didn't – the cabinet actually on this particular game, I didn't take the cabinet in, so the cabinet remained at the game owner's house. So we literally just transported the parts here, and then we transported a completed playfield back to his house and just dropped it in the game and then tried it out. So yeah, that was really fun. So yeah, so Funhouse was my first ramp game in terms of doing a playfield swap and the first game where I didn't take the old one apart. So that was quite a new challenge. You know what would be a good modification to do? So these early 90s Williams games like Funhouse, Doctor Who, and a couple other, I think Terminator 2.
    27:38
    They have the play fields that you just can tilt them up, but you cannot pull them out. So I think as of 93 or 94, it sucks because you can't get back there. So the more modern 90s stuff, you could pull them out, bring them out, do all kinds of different configurations and articulate things. you can get back there and look at the back of the play field working at so i'm wondering you know going forward is there must be a way to modify that a funhouse to be with that yeah that's that's an interesting uh that's a great idea dave i think i think for the doctor who project maybe yeah that's a great idea i think we'd have to look at you'd have to look at those brackets like i have that style bracket on getaway for example you can get them all from pinball life he has all that stuff which is awesome that's great so we'd have to look at that, I think there's a couple issues to consider. The first is, I think that the hole for where the pivot is in a different place on the cabinet. But if you're going to do a re-cabinet sticker, then you could plug the original hole, spray paint over it and drill in a hole, but you've got to locate it, which is not going to be trivial.
    28:50
    So you could, you'd probably have to reference... Have a template of more modern... You could template, I mean, I have modern games here, so I have Getaway or Adam's Family or something like that. then you could template it and then figure out where that hole is and then drill it from there. So I think you'd have to do that. That would be the first thing. The second thing is that bracket is pretty long. The bracket that actually, that it slides on. Yes. That bracket's probably 10 inches, maybe 12 inches long. You would have to have clear, like no sockets, no mechs. Right. Or anything that would interfere with that. Yeah. In the original placement. I guess you have to look at a game that uses that assembly, see how they did it, and then look at yours from the older school, like a Spongebob or Doctor Who, okay, where are their lines at? Where are their go, no-go? Yeah, yeah. You would have to see if there's some strange mechanism. Because, like, for example, Adam's family has, you know, the bookshelf. You know, it's got the arm, you know, the thing arm that comes in, and that's a really big match. Yes, it is. And that thing's huge. and then it also has that rotational mech for the bookcase thing. And so you have to look and make sure that those, because you can't move those mechs. I mean, they're a permanent part of the play field. So you have to make sure that you had sufficient room on either side to fit those brackets. But it's a good idea, and it may very well be possible to do on a lot of games. Doctor Who doesn't have a lot of mechs on it. Well, it does have that up in the elevator. Yeah, but that's held in the middle, though. Yeah. I think that, because I have a Doctor Who in my basement right now that another friend of mine owns. And so he and I did a lot of work on that game together. And so I did pull that, you know, that, what's it called?
    30:37
    What's that called? Something, time machine. It's like a time something or other. Yeah, time expander. Expander, there you go. Time expander. It screams at you. And yeah. That's what's wrong with that game is the screen. Yeah, yeah.
    30:51
    Yeah, the game owner on that one. I love the background music. Yeah, yeah, background music is fun. Yeah, it's really fun. But the screaming I could do without when you're doing the time expander thing. Yeah, that's a pretty problematic mechanism, and I'm sure you know that. You know, both linear sort of mechanism that, you know, it rolls on. I think you have an upgrade kit. I do have an upgrade kit from the Netherlands or someplace overseas. I get this whole, I mean, I get all kinds of cool stuff to put in this game.
    31:20
    That's, you know, I even have the, I got the first moving daylight kit that someone made years ago. Oh, wow. I bought that. Oh, nice. With little laser beams that shoot out. So the laser beams, you know, go back and forth on the head. Ah, cool. So that's going to go on there. So this will be a nice... This sounds really awesome. It's an awesome little project, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it sounds like a great project. Yeah, it's going to be fun. Yeah, we had to get that game, you know, this particular Doctor Who has got quite a history. You'll get a kick out of this. So this was a re-import. So I think you had said a lot of Doctor Whos went overseas, right? Yeah, because over in England, and you're a big fan of Doctor Who over there. Yeah, yeah. And that's a game title I had never seen growing up. I never saw it in arcades. Didn't even know anything. Never saw the show, so I'm ignorant to that title. I've never been exposed to it. The only thing, I didn't really care for that show much, except for I saw it sometimes, I think, after watching Monty Python's Flying Circus. I think it might have came on years ago. And there's one guy who wore the scarf all the time. I forget the guy's name. Everybody's going to say, it's this guy's name, dum-dum. but I don't watch their show so I don't know but that guy I think his name is Graham something or other maybe I don't know but I liked him because he's a lot he's very you can tell he had off the cuff lines he'd make them up as they go he had a lot of freedom of the script you can tell he'd go off script and say some cool stuff the other ones are all like regimented and kind of boring I found this guy would say some funny stuff just add living so I like that I like the creativity that's what I like about the show that's pretty awesome Yeah, I need to watch it sometime. Now that I've played the pin and spent some time restoring it. Find the ones with the guy with the scarf and the hat. The scarf and the hat. It's still playing, right? Isn't it even still in modern day? The modern day one's not nearly as good. Okay, all right. It's a little woke of center, let's say. Is it? Oh, yeah, I don't know. I haven't seen any of them, so I have no reference to comment.
    33:11
    But it was really good back in the day. Yeah, so this Doctor Who. So my friend who owns the game, he used to live out in California. and he bought the game like from I think it was eBay or some such you know auction site had not it was a sight unseen purchase and and the game arrives and it's a German re-import and with cigarettes let a cigarette smoke oh well the cigarette smoke nicotine I mean it was like probably if we could ever get past all the dirt maybe we could find some nicotine in there but independent of all that the game had been like dropped like so the cabinet was all like split in the corners, the play field was cracked, which I've never seen before. You know, the shooter lane, and you've got that, there's like a switch that determines when the ball's in the shooter lane, and that cutout was cracked north for probably four or five inches, and the center of the play field was about a quarter of an inch lower than the rail was because it was cracked and it was all bent downward. So this was really the first time we ever really dealt with a problem like that on that game. And the game owner didn't really have a budget to do a playfield swap. So we were trying to figure out some creative way to fix it. So what we ended up doing, and this goes back to 3D CAD, 3D printing. So this is another story like that. So we sort of measured out at the bottom of the playfield there are switches, there's the solenoid and the kicker that kicks the ball into the shooter lane. And so So there's all these things that are kind of bolted to the bottom of the play field and we decided to design a stitching plate, a plate that could stitch basically across the crack. But it has to be pretty big and it has to be around all of these different obstacles. So there's the switch itself, the mount of the switch, the actual lever arm at the end of it that has to stick down through that whatever the stitching plate is when the ball is there. There were just a ton of obstacles. So anyways, we cabinet it all out and then printed a plastic version of a stitch plate and then put it in the game to just get it to work. And we made a few revisions, moved a few holes here and there and kind of perfected it. And then once we were happy with it, we sent it out to Send Cut Send and they laser cut in stainless steel. Oh yeah. Eighth inch stainless steel. Fantastic. Is that awesome? Great. So, eighth-inch stainless steel, the stitch plate. It is rock solid now. Wow, that's great. Is that awesome? I had no idea a SenCut sent that. That's another little tidbit of a tool device that I might be using in the future. Oh, man, a SenCut sent me. I absolutely adore that place. It's awesome. So, what's their usual thing? Are they like a pinball thing? No, no. They're just a contract manufacturer that does metal plastics. and you basically send them a CAD file, basically a drawing, and then they take that CAD file in and then you select the material that you want it cut in and you select its thickness. And you can select anything you want, copper, aluminum,
    36:25
    iron, regular steel, high-strength steel, stainless steel, whatever you want. And they have plastics as well if you want. And then you select the thickness and it gives you a quote and says it'll be whatever. you know it was and it was very cost effective like this plate was maybe 30 dollars that's it yeah it really that's great extremely cost effective and uh and then once you're happy with it that shows you a picture of what it looks like in 3d that they're about to cut yeah and that's it and then you type in your credit card like a week later or four or five days later it shows up in the mail so you have some skills you have to have some cad skills first all stuff to do this. Otherwise, you're not really... Yeah, you have to have some CAD skills. I'm using a program called FreeCAD. It's a free 3D CAD program. There's a lot of good tutorials out there on how to learn to use it. It runs on PCs, Macs, whatever.
    37:20
    I find it to be pretty easy to use or pretty straightforward. I'm using that, but there's other CAD programs. There's like Fusion 360.
    37:27
    One time I used Inkscape. That's another free CAD program that's out there. I used that when I did my Flash Gordon ramps. I did those on SendCutSend as well.
    37:39
    It depends on if you have a CAD tool that you like. You just have to get it to some 2D transfer file format that SendCutSend can digest. Then they're all set. It's fun. It's just a whole other fun thing to do with Pinball when you're restoring games. Especially it's like, okay, what am I going to do now? you know, this big crack, what is it? Oh, I know, let's try this. Yeah, yeah. It really gets your creative juices flowing. There's a problem here that's kind of rare, where no one's really seen this before, you know, that kind of things you got to figure out, and that's part of the fun of this whole, I don't know, this whole pinball restoration fixing thing, is having a problem and getting a creative way to fix it. Absolutely, absolutely, yeah, yeah, like on this Doctor Who, you know, One of the corner blocks was cracked. I'm sure you've seen that many times. And so we chiseled that out, and then I cut a new corner block out of oak, which is way overkill, of course, and then glued it in and nailed it. Now, corner block on where? This is on the left leg, left front leg, the corner block for the cabinet itself. Okay. So I don't know if you've seen that or not. Not really. Oh, you probably just haven't seen a game that has been dropped and reimported and dropped or whatever. Oh, yeah. I've seen this before. I had a pinball pool that I restored last summer. There must have been a lot of moisture or something. Oh, no. That one got dropped down the stairs. Down the stairs. Yeah. So that one tumbled down the stairs. So the cabinet was all split apart. So the game owner brought it over here, and I told him I would fix it all up. So I had to make new corner blocks for it and then strap it all together and re-glue it and all that kind of stuff to get it all back together. Wow. So, you know, it's fun. I love woodworking, so it's like when a game's sad like that, it's a good opportunity to rebuild it. I've had games like rust buckets. It's like, what am I going to do with this thing? And I just, little by little, you just sand stuff off. You put it in rust remover. Then you clean it and you paint it. And all of a sudden, it's like, well, this thing looks like it was never rustier in any kind of wet environment. It's great fun, you know, a before and after picture. Like, I don't know. and all of a sudden, wow, this thing looks legit. Yeah, yeah. Probably my worst game that was like that was that Kingpin. Remember that Kingpin? Yes. I was looking for a Kingpin because that was the first game that I ever played. So that was on my acquisition list. And you gave me that lead from there was an operator up on the North Shore that had one. And I can't remember the guy's name. It was a wreck of the Hesperus. It was just a bad. Oh, it was a total wreck. Yeah. But the seller was a great guy. He was a really, really great guy. And so I got the game and, man, was it bad. That thing was all rusty. But worse than that, the cabinet was all rotted. It had sat in a wet basement. So the bottom two inches of the cabinet was all completely delaminated and rotted. And the back of it was all rotted. The game was really, really rusty. So the EMs, the company EMs, there was a guy selling whatever that wood material was for the bottom floor of the cabinet. He was selling those. Oh, wow. in Allentown several years ago. And so I guess it's a known thing. They go bad or they're so thin they kind of break through easily. They are thin, yeah. The original Gottlieb ones are only like a quarter of an inch thick. And I can tell when I'm trying to do the old turtle thing, lift the game up, it's like, boy, this thing's really, when I look down at my back, this thing's giving. This thing's going to crack. Yeah, yeah. They're not great. You know, what I did when I rebuilt Kingpin, because Kingpin, you know, the cabinet was all rotted, so the head was so bad I had to remake that, you know, with modern wood. But the cabinet, I cut all the rotted material off of it, and then I biscuit joined fresh wood all the way around it and sanded it all and then repainted the cabinet. So you have to cut out a slot in the back to slide it out? I did. So since I was doing that, I was able to put a slot in it. And then I ended up modifying the design for the reason that you just said. So I ended up using three-quarter inch plywood for the first part. Um, so from, you know, the front where under the coin box, you know, that, that area. Yeah. So I use three quarter inch plywood up until there's a cross bar where the serial numbers stamped onto it. So I use three quarter inch plywood up to there. And then I cut a slot in the three quarter inch plywood. And then I use the quarter inch, the same thickness and the same style plywood that Gottlieb had originally. And I use that in the center. Um, but then when I got to the back, I switched over to like three quarter inch plywood again. for maybe three or four inches before it hit the back. Because that cabinet was, I wanted to make that cabinet really strong because it had so many issues. I was really rebuilding it to be very, very strong and robust when it was finished.
    42:31
    So, yeah, with the original, so that cabinet is really nice. Like if you lift it, you'll feel like, hey, I'm lifting something nice and solid now, either from the back or from the front. But if you try to lift it in the dead center, you'll get that same weakness. System Ones are like that, too. System Ones have a very thin, garbagey kind of bottom to them. It's like Godly. Godly was robust for certain things. Other things they kind of cheaped out on. Yeah, I picked up a countdown, and the bottom was falling out of it. And that's very common on System Ones. And so on that game, I ended up making a new bottom for it and stitching it in. I worked on a getaway in Connecticut for a customer and when I got there I could see the bottom is like just bowed down almost to the floor. It's like, what's going on? Oh, wow. There's so much moisture. You had a getaway. And that has like half inch thick like particle boards. It's a particle board though. Yeah. It doesn't like moisture. It doesn't like moisture at all. And it's got a transform in there. It's super heavy. Yeah, that was heavy. So what I had to do, I had to take, I think I had Mr. T on me. I put Mr. T underneath there. I took some glue and just kind of pushed down on it the best I could. But it really was struggling. It didn't want to do it. And I got it with a couple of screws and some glue and screw. It was worked out. But down the road for another game like that, that's either bowed out or it gets kind of all fuzzy, that kind of stuff. It must be probably the same situation. You have to cut a slot in the back and you have to release it somehow and then slide it out kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. And a lot of times, like the, I mean, it depends on what the, you know, if it's the quarter inch stuff. Or do you do the whole, take a saw and this saw, like saws all out like that around? So, you know, it depends on the game. I got to look at, like, you know, I've done both, and I look at how bad things are on the bottom of the game. You know, and I'll kind of decide a strategy once I see the game, you know. And so, for example, I had a, what was it? It was a Playboy. So it was a Bally Playboy. and on that one the back you know the backs on those are made out of like particle board or whatever and if they ever hit moisture they all like flake and break apart so I had a playboy many many years ago that a friend of mine brought the cabinet over and that was all like rotted out in the back so on that one I ended up cutting all the rotted section out of it and then made a new but I wanted to keep it authentic so it killed me but I made it out of particle board the same material that they used originally well I didn't like it if I had a choice I probably would have done plywood but you just didn't think it would look good so the issue is I was talking the game owner really wanted a relatively inexpensive and quick fix for the cabinet because he was selling the game so he didn't really want to invest a lot in it so I ended up cutting like three inches off the bottom which was the rotted section and the rest of it was still in great shape. So I didn't want to mix plywood with particle board. So I had some particle board with the same thickness and then I used some biscuits and then I was able to join it and glue it and sand it off and it looked great. You couldn't even tell that it was so joint there. And in that case, we had access where you could replace the bottom panel then for free because the back was already out. So that was kind of neat. I had on Countdown, on that game, the bottom fell out of it, and the bottom piece was particle board, like quarter inch. It was just garbage material, and it was all bowed and everything like you described. There's no way of straightening that out. So I replaced that with some really nice quarter inch birch plywood that I had. and uh and in that case like um the the rails you know the the sides of the cabinet which are routed in all of that was missing like it was all broken out and stuff like that so there was nothing to like slide it into it was all missing so i took did the router trick that you said so i took a basically a you know a router and and so i had there was no groove left i got rid of the entire groove yeah so that you could just set the plywood into the game okay and then what i did is i made um out of oak i made like a um like a bottom rail for the bottom of the cabinet that retained the plywood and then it and then it it's like a c or like an l shaped so not c l and so the vertical part of it was up against the plywood and then the horizontal part was against the cabinet's plywood itself. Okay. And I was able to glue that and nail it in. And it came out really, really nice. Can you tell if you looked at it? Yes, you can tell. Because you can see, like, the game has, like, a quarter-inch oak-like dressing on the bottom of the cabinet. Okay. You can actually see it. Okay. If you look at it long, you know. Like looking at the game sitting there. Sitting there, you can see it. Okay. But it's like a quarter-inch. It's not a big deal. Right so I ended up doing that on that game but if you could you could always like paint it the scheme I could if I wanted to It would go right in I certainly could You would never know it then So I decided to just kind of make it like a little bit of an accent border. It looks pretty nice, actually, but it's not original. So that's not the... I had another game, like, what was it? It was a flash, like a Williams flash, where the bottom was falling out of it. On that one, I didn't want to do that. So on that one, I did the really, really thin strips that you kind of glue, clamped and glued all these thin strips all the way along the side to kind of rebuild it. It didn't feel like a structurally great solution. I've done the same kind of thing with, like, you know, especially the Gottlieb stuff back in the 70s, Gottlieb stuff. made a fall apart with the board in the back. And you just know it went at some point and the people would kind of, when they're going to move the game around, they'd step on it and it would kind of break away. There's so many games that have broken away and it just looks like ass. And so what I've done in the past, I use a combination of either quarter round or even thin strips of oak, square strips, like furring strips, something like that.
    49:05
    Between that and using that two-part epoxy clay stuff. Oh, yeah, yeah. And putting those two together and getting that set, filling all the gaps, and then taking a sander, sanding all down until it's smooth, and painting it. It looks great, and it's very solid, and that works well. Another thing I just realized, I like using that two-part stuff, and I like using my bare hands, but I started reading the back of the thing that says, you know, if you touch with skin, you wash your hands immediately. Oh, right, right, yeah. I guess there's some bad chemicals in there. There's some bad chemicals in there. And the skin of your body is your biggest organ. It kind of is, yeah. So it's kind of like, so these days, you know, it's like, so now I'm starting to wear gloves with it. Yeah, skin's kind of misleading. You know, it feels like this is an impenetrable barrier. It's a barrier, right. Yeah, it feels that way. It's not. It turns out it's actually not a barrier. Yeah, exactly. You might want to pay attention to those warnings.
    49:56
    But now I'm using gloves a lot when I eat. Good, smart. But the thing is, I have a latex. I break out in the back of my hands. Oh, no. I break out, but it itches after several hours. The next day, it's like, why did I get itch in the back of my hand? So now I've got to figure out. Have you tried the nitrile ones? No, I've got to get those. Yeah, try the nitriles. There's some people in the restaurant industry, they get these really nice form-fitting tight gloves, and they're making a hamburger, and they're going in, and just with their hands, they're doing all this stuff that they wouldn't want to do with their bare hands for sanitary purposes. But they're using these gloves. Are they white-colored? No, they're black. Black, interesting. So I'm thinking it must be latex. But then I see the same guy, when I see the guy working on a car, he's using the same stuff. Yeah. And I'm getting my gloves from like Amazon. They don't fit as nice and form-fitting. So I've got to find out where these people are getting theirs. Talk to PJ. See if PJ knows. Yeah, maybe they would there. It's like restaurant stuff. Yeah, yeah. Talk to PJ and Stu and see if they can give you, maybe they have a source. Maybe they can give you a couple samples. Yeah. See if they work out. But I would see if you can get a known material. Because if you're breaking out, it probably means. Yeah, that's kind of what that is. probably means it's latex and you have some sort of allergy to it and you need to discontinue and find a different you know different solution yeah so i saw yesterday when you were working on that genie you had the gloves on that was hysterical i had to win that game talking about wreck of the hesper it's a genius it's like whoever well you know worked on her her brother had the game for a while it was like 10 they had it for 20 years and he had it for the past 10 years and stored it and tried to get it running and oh my god there were like so many burned out coils in the game and then so many took lithium grease and sprayed it everywhere so I had to take I spent like an hour Maureen and I with alcohol and rags wiping all that stuff out of there otherwise it all just gets gunked up it was all gunked everything was solid it's like is this like a frozen coil or is this just gunked up some were frozen coils some were just gunked up it was just like oh boy oh boy but I saved her we saved the genie yeah yeah so she said when the customer came down the stage she goes I can't believe you resurrected this thing and it's like, yeah, I wasn't expecting it to be this much of a project. You know, Genie was my first love. That was my first pinball machine. You brought it up with several flights upstairs too. Oh, yeah. No, Genie's kind of a funny story. So, you know, I always wanted to have a pinball machine, right? I mean, I love pinball, hopefully like everyone here on the podcast does too. And I was in college and I met this guy that worked for Rowe Industries. I met him on the Cape. Super nice guy. and he said, hey, we get games that come off route every now and then and if one comes off, he says, I'll sell it to you. And I said, that's great. I said, here's my number or whatever. And sure enough, he called me up. This was in 1985.
    52:43
    So he called me up and said, hey, I've got a game, a Gottlieb Genie. I didn't even know what a Genie was actually at that time. I'm not sure. So you had no idea it was one of the biggest footprint games out there. All I knew is I was getting a pinball machine and that's all I cared about. And so my roommate and I, who's Dave also, same name as yours. I love people named Dave, it seems. And so he and I, we borrowed his dad's pickup truck, and we were both going to UMass. We both were roommates or whatever. He had engineered a way to get our beds on a loft. So he had engineered and he built like a loft system so the beds were elevated off the ground, like maybe six feet off the ground or whatever, which gave us the space to be able to put a pinball machine in our room. You were two engineers in school. That's the situation? Of course, yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah, he was a mechanical engineer and I was an electrical engineer. Perfect. Well, there you go. Practical. So after school, we picked up his dad's pickup truck, drove out on 128 to where Rowe Industries was. It was late at night. It was like 7, 8 o'clock at night or whatever. And we go into the warehouse of Rowe Industries, and then there's pinball machines everywhere. Everywhere. I'm sure. yeah this is 1985 oh yeah so some good so they're everywhere there's there's a rows of them and then they're up on like there's some even on like shelves right yeah dave it was the craziest thing wow it was like oh my god look at all these pinball machines this is awesome yeah and he's got a genie there you know sitting on one of those roll around dollies or whatever and uh you know and it works you know and it's rough what do you want for back in the day i think i paid 225 bucks for it deal $2.25 and it worked so I paid him cash and then we loaded up in the pickup truck and then we proceed to get back to our dorm it's probably 2am or whatever and the two of us deadlifted because we did not have a cart or any of that kind of stuff but you had nice young backs I was 20 or whatever I was in pretty good shape back then and so was my roommate we didn't even think twice about it we deadlifted the whole thing had to carry it all the way from the student parking all the way across this huge open garden area or whatever, and then get it into our dorm room and then with the head and set it all up. It was so much fun. I was on the first floor right when you walked in. Yes. So I used to leave the door open, have the game on, and everybody loved it. Everybody loved Buccini. It was awesome. So it worked? Did it need much work at all? It worked when I first got there, and then it had all the standard stuff. It had all the original boards in there. Original boards. But this is 1985, so they weren't that old. Not that old. But even day one, they weren't that good. Yeah, yeah. So I had a couple things. I had the rectifier for the 62 volts or whatever for the displays. You know, there's four. In the cabinet. Yeah, yeah. You know the displays. You know, there's a high voltage for the displays, the blue displays. There's a, on the power supply board, there's four discrete diodes that are the bridge rectifier for that. I had one of those short out. Okay. And then it was blowing the quarter amp 69-volt fuse or whatever. But fortunately, I was able to find it. And, you know, I went to Radio Shack. Remember that place? Oh, yeah. And I got new diodes, and I rebuilt the bridge rectifier and got it working again. I had one or two connectors, you know, the standard connector problems that those games had. I had to repin a couple of connectors.
    56:07
    The standard stuff, you know, flippers. I didn't know where to get parts. so like when stuff went wrong it would be like coke cans and zip ties yeah exactly that kind of stuff because i didn't know about steve young i don't think steve was around was he in 1985 he was around since even back then he was always like keeping pinball affordable since i don't know i want to say like the late 70s oh i i didn't know believe me if i knew steve existed i gosh i would have been a continuous customer even then uh i didn't know of steve i just had no idea where to get parts. Is he the late 70s or early 80s? I know he worked in, I want to say, some high-tech industry in New York somewhere, one of those high-tech firms, and he was some kind of, I want to say financial guy or something like that, and retired from that. That sounds right, yeah. He was definitely a tech dude. Tech dude. Maybe even IBM or something like that. Yeah, one of those things. I think he was at IBM, actually. Yeah, he's a very, very smart guy. Oh, yeah. He really is a great guy. Yeah, so I didn't know about Steve, so unfortunately I didn't have a parts, and this is pre-internet, so where are you going to get parts, right? So my friend at Rowe gave me like a goodie bag with Genie, so it had a whole bunch of rubbers on it, and it had light bulbs. Rubbers, light bulbs. Did it have any flipper parts? I can't remember now. It might have had some flipper rebuild parts. I don't remember that, so don't quote me there. So that kept the game kind of running between that and when the electrical problems occurred. I was able to debug all the issues that it had, at least at that time, and keep the game running. And it was interesting because we had to move the game in and out of the dorm room every semester. So every semester we would have to move it out of the dorm room, move it into my father's basement, which is not trivial. Because how come? Because that place was not yours to stay? Correct. Yeah, the way the rule at UMass was that all rooms had to be vacated at the end of the semester. So even though we were going to be in the same dorm, they reuse the rooms for the summer like in the summer they had some sort of summer education program or something like that and so I moved that game I don't know how many times and it was dead lifted every time up and down my father's stairs I can't believe I got that wide body up and down my father's stairs it was crazy in his house and then I moved into an apartment in Hudson and moved Jeannie into that and I think I probably moved it maybe a dozen times at that point. I don't remember. And then I was going to have to move again and I think I had had it in terms of moving. I was like, you know, I could just buy another pinball machine. I had this for a long time. So I sold it. I think I sold it for about the same, $225. Okay, well, there you go. So I think I kind of broke even. You free play out of it. Yeah, so I had it for four or five years. But I have such a soft spot for Genie. You have a Genie copy? I got a beautiful Genie copy that it found me after all these years because it was the same genie that I played as a kid at Framingham Volorama. I don't know, I was 10, 12 years old, 14 years old. Because the reason I was fond of me, this was like years ago, in the 90s.
    59:19
    A customer called me up with a Stern Magic in Framingham, next town over, and went to his house, and I said, well, yeah, I could, I could, I could, wait, no, sorry, I had a Stern Magic, sorry. He had a Genie. I had a Stern Magic. And he said, hey, I really don't – the Genie doesn't work. I really don't want it. Do you have anything else you could trade for it? And it's like, yeah, I got a nice working Stern Magic, which I think Stern Magic is a very pretty game, very boring game. Okay. But pretty. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure I know the title. It's an MPU-100 game, like Trident, Memory Lane. Is it a Chimer, too? It must be a Chimer. No. No, it's not a Chimer. it's got the beep beep boop boop terrible sound card oh so it's before the SB300 oh it's terrible it's a cheap sound card so it had to go so and I said well yeah I always liked Genie I remember playing Genie as a kid so I picked up I looked inside when I got home and I found Framingham Bolorama nice tech card in there it's like this is the game I played nice and it's like and the backlash is gorgeous the play feels gorgeous usually it's worn out by the top ABCD at the top of the game that was not worn out at all. And it's so cool. It's like I played this game as a kid and it found me. After all these years it found me. That's awesome. He got it from that place, the Bola Remo place. That's awesome. So that was great. So I still have it to this day and I just, and I like the game. I haven't set it up in a long time. It's been a long time. Last time it's probably been 10 years since I played your genie. I mean, yours is a really nice copy. It's a nice copy. I really liked it. But I will say, I mean, as the ones go though, I mean, I think, You know, Joke of Poker is a more fun game. Yep. Pinball Pool is more fun. Agreed. Countdown is more fun. I agree. And Genie is kind of, it's such a big game to set up. What they set up, there's so many other worthy candidates to set up that I have that are saying, oh, pick me, pick me. But it's so beautiful. It is. The artwork is stunning on that game. I should have it up for like a guest game for at least like a week or something and just kind of, you know. I mean, it's, you know, it's just everything about that game is so beautiful. Give me the next pinball party. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll help you set it up. Okay, here we go. All right. Fair enough. Give you some genie love. Because right now, I have my Stern Row, Stern Street. Yeah, Stern Row is fantastic. And I've got Bally Alley upstairs, and I've got the tech area. But I'd like to have, at some point, a Gottlieb area, a Stern area, a Bally, and a Williams area. Because I'd like to have them all, their day in the sun. That would be awesome. Have them all going. You have such beautiful copies of these. it's nice to complain thank you the tough part is when you get a Fathom and an 8-Ball Deluxe and a rare Blackjack EM set up together and a star this beautiful star it's like I want to put up my $6,000 man I just finished I want to put that upstairs but my wife says I want to put it make it game number 5 you're going to be up it's like the room is too crowded I like 4 up there I like 5 up there it's too crowded so it means I've got to take something down well why am I taking it down I think it's probably Blackjack yeah that's why I think so too it's been up for so long don't get me wrong I love playing your blackjack and people love that game when they come over that's the one thing they go to so I almost take it away from them I go to it because A it's very fun to play and B it's just super rare it's rare so I'll never see another copy of it again so I tend to gravitate towards it it's fun to play and it's rare it's the only one that I'll probably ever see in my life and so I'm going to play it whereas like 8 ball deluxe it's like I own it so you know fathom love the game but I had no other many other people to have fathom so I can play it at your place or somewhere else. So that's cool.
    62:57
    And stars. Everybody loves stars. So there's plenty of people that have stars. But that one is just so rare. And your $6 million man is kind of rare too. That's a game I don't know anyone else who has. They did make around 7,000 of them. Yeah, I'm surprised. But you don't see them. I don't know why that's the case. I don't know why they don't surface more often. I think it's the best 78 ballet effort because the other 78 ballads, there weren't a lot of not-so-great games. Yeah, I don't know why they don't surface because I love the themes, fantastic. I love the digits. It's got that 1970s, like the computer, like 5 and the 7. I love that font. It's fabulous. It's awesome. I'd almost like to do a My Game. Someone did a whole redo of $6 million man where they did these sound effects and this kind of stuff and the music from the show. but it's almost too much over the top and if I did that I like to put my own music in the background that's why I don't like the modern ramp game, it competes that's why I like old school games you can play the Meteors the 8-Bottle Luxes, they have their own stuff going on but it still plays well with tunes, same thing with the Chime game you can play your own tunes so Sixth Pillar of Mirrors having its own thing its own background music all the time after a while it gets boring but I did like what this guy did he did some sound effects like that oh that's great so I was thinking if I could add some kind of sound card effect that I was thinking the three zeros on the side, every time you hit one of those it does that to add into the regular part of the game sounds, an additional thing you can throw in there I do that, it's like seasoning it's a little bit of seasoning in there without killing the sauce with too much salt yeah it's pretty cool, I like it So it might be something down the road. I think Six Million deserves a slot up there because, you know, I mean, he did a great job, you know, doing that restoration. The game's gorgeous. The play feels beautiful. I mean, it plays perfectly. Like, it's brand new. So it deserves a slot. And to get that center post to be just right. That center post, usually people have it up too high, too low. It's also, the trick is, you have to shim it on this four mounting spots underneath there. you have to shim it because if what's it just goes up regularly it's always tilted a little bit oh it's not flat yeah yeah so you get a shim it so when you shim it it brings it down and it's such it's a pain in the neck to adjust that the right and so i got just the right height and then um when it's flat when it goes up it it didn't have enough um height and sometimes when the ball would come down hit it it'd make the ball go down it'd make the ball make you go down and you lose the ball. Oh, no. So I had to fix that. So I fixed that by doing a modification. I actually, there's an E-clip that makes it only go up a certain amount of height and the E-clip stops the height. Basically, I took the E-clip out. Now it can freewheel and go up a little bit higher by another eighth, sixteenth of an inch. Aren't you afraid of it overextending? No, I can't because the spring isn't that strong. Really? Well, I'd be afraid of it like popping out or something like that overextending and having the mech fall apart. No, it won't because there's more stuff to the other end. There's more stuff. There's more armature. The spring isn't strong enough to spring it that hard out. It's a weak spring. So it's not a problem. Not a problem. So I was trying to figure out different ways to do it. So I said, let's just try the easy way. Take the spring clip out. Take the E-clip out and see what happens. And that's solved. Nice. Now it comes up to the right height. It goes down to the right height. It's just right. But I think it's sort of a manufacturing defect a little bit of how they did it. So I kind of did my own little take on it. Nice. The only thing left in that game is I've got to do a little bit of cabinet touch-up. I'm going to have more. I keep saying, I'll do it. No, I want to do that. It's like, okay, well, then do it because otherwise I'm going to do it. So I've got to have her do that. But then once she does that, I want to do my typical, you know, I have a YouTube channel. I want to put that on the YouTube channel. But I want to have it all done. Yeah, yeah. And I want to do it down in the tech area where that's where I do my filming typically because I have more room around it to do a whole expose. Right, right. I put it in a lineup. I can't do the whole show. Yeah. so that's why I want her to do her touch up then I can do the little show then I can move it upstairs okay that's the plan seems like a great plan yeah I like it well I look forward to having it upstairs another thing I want to get upstairs too I got a friend of mine old friend Jeremy he's now my brother-in-law he keeps saying when I bought a game from him so I know him yes that's right I bought Circus from him Circus yes he said when are you going to put a he loves playing he's a nice guy he loves playing Power Gone He loves playing Paragon Flippers with me. Yep, yep. And I haven't ended up in so long. He said, when are you going to put that back up? It's like, oh, I don't know. Oh, I do love Paragon. I do too. But so many people have that game, and I play it at Mike's house. But it's like, I do have a really nice copy. You do. Your copy's fantastic. I love that game. So then I'm thinking, okay, I can put a $6 million man in Paragon up there, but I'm going to bring Paragon up there. Am I going to be at the five level, or am I going to take something else out? Well, you know, maybe Stars. I don't know. Star or Fathom. I could take Fathom out. Oh, I don't know. That seems blasphemy to take Fathom down. It is a little bit. I don't think Fathom's ever been down, has it? No, Fathom's been down. Really? Yeah. I'd say Fathom and 8-Ball Deluxe are the longest in the team. Yeah, they're almost always there. I've never seen 8-Ball Deluxe down. I took that down once, and then I was like, why did I take that down? Yeah, yeah. So she's always up. She's always up. Fathom's almost always there that I can remember. Yeah, Fathom's been there for quite a while. You had a Flash Gordon next to there at one time. I did. It was pretty cool. I really liked that. It was fun. It didn't last long, unfortunately. No, I sold the Flash Gordon, got it back, and I sold it again. Yeah. And I still have two nice Flash Gordons I need to build for myself. But, I don't know. There's so many projects. Oh, Flash Gordon's a great game. It is a great game. I adore that. That's one of their best they did. That's a tough game. A lot of fun to play that game, too. I love it. Ming is pretty merciless. It's totally merciless, which I absolutely love. Yeah. It's beautiful. mean as hell.
    69:02
    For me, it's like one in 20 games is decent. Maybe one in 30 that I have one good ball. But that one good ball is just something else. You earned that one good ball.
    69:13
    That's another great... Another great pin I haven't had in a long time is Embryon. Yeah, that's a really... No one has that game. I'm sure I played your... Mike S. has a copy of Embryon. Oh, he does? He's got a pretty nice copy, actually. He plays great. So it's really nice. So I played his copy a bunch of times. He had lent it out to Nick for a while, and then he just got it back. So it's back now. I like Embrace. That's a fun game. There's a lot going on in that game. There is. I get a special ROM that Scott made for me years ago that is two-time scoring when two balls are on the field. Oh, neat. Oh, that's cool. That's what it should be anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what Fathom does too. There's two or three ball multipliers. Nice, nice. I think any multi-ball game should do that. And Scott also did that on Flight 2000, same thing. Okay, yeah, yeah. The more balls are on the field, the more you score. Yeah, so it's kind of like exponential because you have twice as many balls, you have twice as many opportunities to score. Yes. And if it's 2X, then it's really a 4X thing. Yeah. So that's pretty good. And it's because otherwise the old school games, when they have multiball, it's like, okay, multiball is great, but I'm not really getting anything extra for getting this multiball thing. Yeah, like I have firepower, for example. And that was one of the first, I don't know if it was the official first multiball, but it was certainly one of the first mainstream solid state multiballs. And on that one, you kind of got to have the pop bumpers lit or something like that to be able to really get much for, and the multiballs just drain as quickly as possible. And it's not that easy to get them in the first place. But you're not getting anything for the multiball. Right, and that's my point. I'm just supporting that. Firepower suffers from what you just said. So no one made a mod for that? I don't know. I know that there's a special game ROM, but you have to have... Well, the skill shot that you can do. Yeah, yeah. But that's all I think it does, though. So Tom had some sort of special ROM for his. He sold that game. He doesn't have it anymore. But you need a... It has to be... Like, the ROM is bigger than what fits on a System 6 board. So it has to be like a System 7. Right. Yeah. Although, you know, though, with Weebly and the Alpha board, you probably don't. They probably wouldn't work in those. It would or wouldn't. It would. Yeah. I don't think so. Maybe I should put a System Alpha in my Firepower. Maybe that's a good excuse for me. I love that board. Yeah. And I put them in other people's games, but I don't have it in my games. You actually got to think because you can flash anything into that Yeah it anywhere I am It doesn matter It doesn care So then you could do that It just needs a hex file Yeah that fantastic Yeah yeah that a really good idea Maybe I splurge and throw a system alpha in there and get the new code Oh, you have just the old school board. I just have the original boards, yeah. I had Alan redid all the boards for that game. So he replaced the 40-pin connector. He didn't, oddly enough, he didn't replace all of the nine-pin connectors, all the standard ones. He didn't replace any of those, and I had some of those fail on me over time. You know how they're like... They're just like penny nails. Yeah, they're made out of some material that like... It's like you build a house with them. Yeah, they're made out of some material that doesn't solder. It's crazy stuff. It doesn't. Yeah, you put them in solder, there's a big little crater hole. Yeah, and it leaves a crater hole. It's nuts. So I did replace all of those connectors, and I repinned them because the game was getting wonky on me, and it's been rock solid since then. But maybe I should invest in a System Alpha board. Yeah, it's cheap money. Yeah, $140 or whatever. But then what do I do with the original board set? Sell them. I guess. Sell a working thing on eBay. People would buy it. Yeah, I guess so. Because people don't know about Alpha. Yeah, I guess so. I mean, to me, Alpha is a total no-brainer. You'll probably get $150 for the set. Yeah, the Alpha is a no-brainer, man. I mean, it's like, that's my go-to. If any of those System 3 to 6 boards, you know, games, if any of those are giving me any, like, headaches with the board set, I'm just like, put a System Alpha in here. I'm not going to deal with these boards anymore, you know. So, thanks. I don't know the fellow who designed that, but I'll tell you, my hat's off to you. Oh, yeah. Whoever designed that did a phenomenal job. It's a really, really well-engineered board. It's a great engineer board. it's an awesome board. It fills a great niche. It really does. I put it in a blackout most recently that was doing all those system sixes because of the connectors and all that crap. They get a mind of their own, and all of a sudden, a solenoid will get stuck on, and it'll blow a fuse. And it was doing that stuff randomly, and this is a game that gets played with NEPL, the pinball league. And so you can't have that when people are playing it, and all of a sudden, and the game just decides to get a solenoid stuck on and then blow a fuse. So I was just like, I talked to the game owner, and it was like, I don't really want to deal with these boards, but if you order this system alpha board, I will put it in for you, and the game will be solid after that. It's a cheap way out. It was cheap and good. Yeah, and the game has been rock solid since then. In fact, I played that person in NEPL, and I played that blackout, and I was trying to play a lot of the crap out of it because I have a blackout, and I'm still in the fence of if I'm going to keep it or not. It's just like, I,
    74:24
    because for me, it's a sister game to Firepower. It is. It's kind of a sister game. And it's single ball, not multi-ball, which is kind of a bummer. But I'm trying to think, is there enough to do in that game to keep things going for me? It's like, for me, it's like for the Williams games from the time frame that I think that are any fun. I like Alien Poker. Yep, Alien Poker's great. I like Firepower. It's a lot of action going on. It's a fun game. And it's pretty mean, too. Firepower is not. It's a good, mean game. That's a great game to have in a tournament. It really is. It's a great tournament game. It's a great game if you're hanging out with your buddies. Yeah. And you just want to play against each other. You can play Firepower for a while and have a lot of fun on that game. I'm trying to think of the other Williams games that I really like. And it's like they really need to have it. I can't really think of it. There's Black Ops, Firepower, and Alien Poker. But what else for Williams games would I really want for that time frame? Yeah, hang on. That's a good question. Like, you know, Phoenix, forget it. Not very fun. No, Phoenix, no. You know, Tri-Zone, it's okay. I don't need to own it. It's fun to play. I think for you, with your collection, Tri-Zone's not a good fit. It's too much of a B or C title. But I actually really like Tri-Zone. I have to say, I did restore a Tri-Zone several years ago. It's fun for what it is. I thought it was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I like the colors on it. It's beautiful. It's a beautiful play field. And it was really fun to play, but it's more of a hybrid EM, early solid state, you know, in terms of its complexity. It has its place. but I wouldn't have a whole game room of TriZone class games. Put it this way, TriZone or Blackout?
    75:56
    I would go with Blackout. Oh, Blackout and a heartbeat. Maybe because you like the theme, maybe. Yeah, I like the theme. But the play, though. I think the play, I mean, there's just a lot more going on with Blackout. There's a lot more to do. Like Blackout has, you know, you've got all those stand-up targets on the left, like five of them, and then you've got, you know, three drops, three drops. You've got the hole. you know you've got some nice shooting paths on bright blackout too which is kind of cool you have that like cross yeah that's true you cross through there that's really fun yeah kind of tight shot yeah it's a tight shot but when you make it it's really fun the spinner um i can't remember yeah i'm sure you're right but uh i think blackout's a much better title yeah and heartbeat i really like blackout a lot actually i'm kind of a little bit biased blackout or firepower that's a tougher one if blackout was multi-ball i would tell you blackout but there's something about multiball with firepower fire one fire two that's true i mean how could you beat that and it's not easy to get multiball on that no it's not and then it's over like in a blink yeah exactly the game's so mean you know so i don't know there's something about it steve richie talking yeah so exactly so uh firepower is pretty cool yeah theme's really cool on firepower it's a great game and it's fast that's the other thing about firepower too and i think like the problem with the drops on Blackout is they're the Williams drops. Right. That's why I love the MRS switch thing. Yeah. I always do that. It's the way to go. The way to go. Unfortunately, the Blackout that our friend in NAPL doesn't have that upgrade. So he's got the sluggish, you know, those crazy printed circuit boards and stuff. Maybe take some of that medieval madness money and divert that to doing some of these nice mods. Yeah, yeah. You know, that's a good point. I'll talk to him about that because I'm pretty influential on that one. So I could potentially make that happen. It's not that much money for the game. It really isn't. It's so much more reliability, so much more gets rid of this old junk in there. Well, it's funny because I have a friend, Adam. He has a Flash, and displays were out on it, weren't working right, and he kind of wanted to get the game working, at least working, so that it, at least working somewhat correctly. He's more like for the players game. Yeah, yeah. So he wanted to just get it working. I think he was probably going to sell the game at some point. Sure. And so I went and did those, the Wolfpack displays. I think you've done Wolfpacks before, right? Actually, I do the Pinatech ones. Oh, really? Oh, I haven't used Pinatech. Versus, because I was... Actually, that's not true. I guess I have used it. Because I was waiting to actually go to LED. Like, I'm not an early adopter of any of this stuff. Yeah, yeah, you don't do it. You're not as big of an LED guy. I want the proving grounds first. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. You guys prove it out. You guys sell me on this, and I'll see if it's going to be the right thing. That's fair. So they did prove it to me. I saw multiple things that they showed. We went for the original digits and the certain look or whatever. They compared it to a real plasma and theirs, and it got so close to a plasma. I want plasma. I want the look of a plasma, the reliability of an LED. And the other ones, like the Rotten Dogs of the World, this and that, had all that white-looking thing. It just looked like you just could see it was LED back there. It doesn't look horrible to me. Yeah. I want it to look seamless. That's fair. So they finally sold me on that and said, okay, that looks legit. So I did it on several of my games, High End Restoration of a Centaur I did. It looks fantastic in there. Nice. Now, the problem is with all these things, Wolfpack and these, it just takes so much time to assemble and saw this stuff. Yeah, yeah, their kits. It's just their kits. And you really want to get really good with, you know, take the cube numbers. You take a black Sharpie and you kind of color all the way around. I've done that, too, to get it all black. then you take the special they do come with smoke film which looks good but I've actually upgraded it even more I found my own sticky back smoke film on an eBay site that thing looks even better and it looks like it's just seamless so I've done that a couple times but yeah I like those LEDs just the time to do them it's a lot of time on Adam's machine on his flash it had the standards some of the displays were cooked and the driver was broken. Exactly. I mean, you can't fix these things. If you do, it's going to come back. It's going to come back. So I was like, I'd done the Wolfpack ones a bunch of times. I was like, look, let's do Wolfpack. Let's do it in blue. Right. And man, is it gorgeous on Flash. Holy cow. It's a blue game. The displays are gorgeous in blue. Nice. Really, really came out nice. Cool. Really nice. So anyway, so I'm test playing it afterwards. The displays are gorgeous, right? And I'm test playing it and I'm just like, these drop targets are so sluggish and sometimes they don't score it drives me nuts you know and so yeah that that mr what'd you call it again mr mrs mrs yeah read switch yeah yeah yeah that's a guy over at um yeah oh what's this guy's name i'll forget it he he's on pin side troxel yeah troxel i i've bought so many kits from him and then he has this other special thing because that certain games like Gorgar, the pop bumper coil is so close to this MRS device you put in there, it'll trigger. A false trigger. Something like that. The EMF. Sure. So he sells, you want this EMF shielding thing with a sticky back on it that you put over, and it blocks it. Nice. And some of the big restoration houses, I saw him talking about it, and I said, no, I didn't like how that looked on there because it's Chris Hutchins. he does a nice job but Chris's work is beautiful but he's all about you know outside and inside everything's looking just spotless and everything is all you know like a show car so he didn't like how that would look for a show car thing for this piece of shielding me and it's like no I'm just going to go with what Williams did just the regular Williams stuff oh wow just do the MRS no but it's like you're missing out on a whole upgrade yeah I think that's a you know to me that's definitely like a no brainer all of them because you know Any kind of upgrade that makes a substantial improvement in the gameplay, like the target drops faster and it scores every time. Every time. It's reliable. It drops faster and faster. It drops instantly, so it feels better. It feels better, yes. It's just more satisfying when it drops. It feels like a nice little bally target. It feels like a bally, or even the gotleads are pretty nice. Yeah, gotleads drop fast, too. They have a high spring. They have a lot of tension in the springs on gotleads. Gottlieb has a great drop target. They do, and gotleads don't brick. They don't bally brick. They don't brick. They always work. You know, I have a solution. I've, like, solved the bricking problem. Yeah, you were telling us. Tell the audience you were solved there. So I did a bunch of, you know, restorations on some classic sterns, you know, stars, meteor, galaxy. I just did three in a row where I did play field swaps and, you know, full restorations. And I bought new targets from Steve Young over at PPR. And the targets look gorgeous. They're really nice, hot stamped, beautiful looking, right? but they all have hoods on them and originally they didn't have hoods but they have hoods. And the hoods are there because inline drops need the hoods to roll over. So it rolls over them. But they belong there. They don't belong in other spots. Right. But on those three titles there are no inline drops. Everything's just standard just a standard drop target bank or whatever. And all of these games the freaking targets were bricking every time. Right. And it drives me absolutely bonkers. Yes. But you did the whole refurb right and you restored it right. Oh, yeah. And I've got the targets, you know, when I run the banks right up against the woods. I've got maximum throw. Exactly. I've got the, you know, the rubbers all the way far back enough so that, you know, it's probably a throw for this thing to drop. Do you actually do the other thing, too? I do one more thing as well besides what you're going to say about it. Yeah. I take the plate that they sit on. I take that to the buffer and I polish it. Yeah, I buffer those, too. Okay, good. That's right. So the target just slides off like butter. Slides off. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. I do all of that. Yeah. and they still brick and my own personal meteor bricks too yeah you know so like even it's like i did a meteor for somebody else and then my own personal meteor bricks with steve's targets and i like i bought i talked to steve about it steve was like he's like the molds that he has are all hooded so he said there's not really anything he can do about it he doesn't have the molds for for the chiclet style so it is what it is but he does though because he sells the bulls I thought he does have tombstone. But there's something about the tombstone and classic sterns. Yeah, and there's something about classic sterns where he doesn't do them. I don't know. I talked to Steve about it. Because classic sterns came with those. I know. I agree. He told me he didn't have the molds for it. So anyways, this is driving me nuts. So Steve was like, well, you can try upgraded springs. Much stronger springs. Pull them down faster or whatever. So I did that. I bought a set of upgraded springs that were much higher tension. And then they don't feel right because normally they have this like this like butter like butter instead they're like clunky they're much clunkier and uh it still didn't it made it better but it didn't solve it 100 so finally i'm studying it and i'm like i look at the hood and i take a ball and put it up against uh the edge of the hood and it's very clear that the ball does not hit the face of the target when you have a hooded stern from steve young what's it hitting it hits the actual hood first that's the first point of contact. It's not the target face. So what's happening is when you have an extremely fast hit, it hits the hood and it's at an angle and it causes the target to lift. It actually, instead of, so it puts a force, which actually lifts, an upwards force, and it lifts. And then the target is actually above the landing plate. It's not at the landing plate height, It's above it, and then it hits the rubber, and then it bounces off the rubber, and it lands back on the landing plate. Right. And you have a brick. That's what's happening. I can assure you that's what's happening. Wow. So I took, on my table saw, I put a, like I have a sanding plate, you know, and you can get these sanders that have sanding plates on them as well. And then I sanded, you know, basically ground the hood off of it on both the sides and the top. I converted it to a chicklet. Do you do multiple grits? I think I have 120 maybe. So 120, that's it. Something like that. Yeah, don't quote me. I can look it up downstairs. Something like that. Doesn't it melt and so forth? Don't you get a melty thing? No, it leaves a little bit of a melty stuff on the side, but it's fine. Yeah, it works. And then I reinstalled the drop targets. Absolutely zero bricks, ever. Wow. So my meteor doesn't brick anymore. So I've done, like I took all the drop targets out of my meteor. I ground them all down. And you've got to be careful, too, because you're trying to preserve artwork on that target. And I did a centaur because I was afraid of the centaur bricking. Right. Because I've seen some of the valleys with hooded targets, you know, brick also. So I did a centaur restoration last year. And when I received the new targets from Steve, I also ground all those down. And on the R, I think I hit the artwork. Oh. I was so mad. So I called Steve up and said, you know, do you mind shipping me another R for centaur? you know so he sent me another one so that was great but uh yeah so it's a little bit tricky to grind that hood off and uh you know not accidentally grind the art you're kind of you're going at it little by little just a little bit of a neat neat you know sanity check sanity check yeah yeah you know just do it when do it have some nice like relaxing music in the background there you go right i wouldn't have some hardcore rock and roll no you know you want to be you know like a zen state when you do it so you know but it's that kind of thing but it's a game changer all of a sudden you have non-breaking targets. It's just unbelievable. And then the game is such a pleasure to play then. Then it plays like it should. Right. And you can just sweep the targets, and they drop like butter. Nice. It's awesome. So if that's the tip for today. Yeah. It's a great tip for today. If you get targets from Pinball Resource, and they're Classic Stern, and maybe even Classic Valley too, and they're hooded, if you don't need the hood, it's worth grinding it off. It makes sense because I've had two Galaxies, and they played great. but all the time I just noticed those drop targets they would brick a lot on Galaxy and there's zero bricks on because that Galaxy I did the play field so that's all tombstone that you did for his Galaxy well again I bought the new targets from Pinball Resources Steve and those were all hooded and I ground them all down to make them tombstones and now there's no zero bricking wow it's never brick since then yep it's been perfect totally solved the problem even with the original springs too and Steve won't do it because he just even he got them all too much money I told Steve about it, you know, about this mod. Yeah, he fixed it. And, you know, he said he did not have the right crossing of molds to be able to do a classic stern in a tombstone. I wonder if it would make sense for him to, like, okay, well, get yourself a sander and sand them all down for us, Steve. It's a lot of labor, though. Because I think he has, I'm pretty sure he gets it molded outside. Okay. I'm pretty sure he told me. Like, he owns the molds, but I think he has an outside vendor that molds it for him. So I don't know if he'd want to involve me. So at some point I should come over here and just take all my stern drop pads and do a sanding session. Do a sanding session, yep, exactly. So, yeah, it doesn't take that long to do it. It's pretty straightforward. So, yeah, if you want to come on over and I'll load the right sanding disc onto my table saw and you can do it. It's pretty straightforward. Okay. So just be careful with your finger. Yeah. I've heard about fingers and table saws. Don't really. Yeah. Yeah, I had my first table saw accident. Your first whoopsies. Yeah. And you've done a lot of woodworking, so this is kind of, maybe you were due. Maybe, I don't know. For those of you who are woodworkers out there, you live in constant, hopefully, awareness. And you're super careful. John is super careful about it. He's always taking precautions and stuff. He's always, you know, so it's rare for you to actually have a whoopsies like that. It is. But unfortunately, I guess I'm a human, and us humans make mistakes, and I clearly made one. I made a boo-boo. So, yeah, my finger is pretty messed up now. But fortunately, hopefully it'll recover. Hopefully it'll do a full recovery. But I'm suffering the pain in the interim at least. But now you're looking at getting this super-duper table saw that explains what this thing does. So it automatically will stop the blade before it even touches your finger. Yeah, yeah. So the table saw I have now I bought probably 30 years ago or so. It's a Delta contractor saw. It was made in the U.S. This is like the old school, for those of us who love classic old school. Delta is a great name. Like cast iron. It would be hard to part with it. However, there's a company called Stop Saw that has come out with some pretty cool technology. It's pretty elegant. And it's a table saw, which has basically a preloaded cartridge that has this massive piece of aluminum that has a spring behind it and a retainer, which can be electronically discharged.
    91:25
    And then the retainer explodes, and then that causes this plate to just drive itself instantly into the blade. So the blade is whirring along at, say, 4,000 RPM, and there's an electronic circuit. The blade is isolated from the cabinet itself, so it's electrically isolated. And there's a circuit that's looking for any type of current that can flow between the blade and the base cabinet of the saw itself. Very similar to GFCI.
    91:59
    There's some differences in the way that it would work. But in general, it's how it kind of works. In general, it's sort of looking for something like that, looking for a leak. And if it sees a leak, then the circuit fires this electronic release, and then that causes the spring to push this aluminum, this massive aluminum-like plate into the blade. So, I mean, it totally destroys the blade, destroys the aluminum piece. But within five milliseconds, the blade is stopped. So five milliseconds, which is about a third of a revolution of the blade. And also, again, it sucks the blade right down out of the table. Exactly. And mechanically, they designed the arbor so that the arbor disappears from the surface of the saw. And at first, when I saw this on YouTube channel a while ago, I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. You can just do this over and over again. You were saying, oh, no, no. This is going to, this destroys. Yeah, yeah. This destroys. So it's better, it actually self-destructs so it does not self-destruct your finger. Yeah, yeah. But I can tell you from experience that the cost of getting a finger restored is way, way higher than what the replacement blade and other stuff would be. Yes. It's well worth it. Yeah. So I'm definitely considering that. I haven't made the decision to purchase a Yacht. I'll have to sell my saw first. It's like blinds. Oh, hello. It is like a blinds. Oh, hey, Maureen. Our better haves are here.
    93:24
    Hi. So we're wrapping up. well thank you John for this awesome collaboration here yeah it was fun thanks again it's been an honor to be on your podcast and I always enjoy listening to you and George so it was a lot of fun chatting thanks for spending the time with me my pleasure we'll do this again we'll have plenty more to talk about join us at Pintastic for anybody who's listening Pintastic's coming up I'm not sure it's going to happen and I talked to Dave Marston about it, and he said he's pretty booked up, so it may not happen until next year. I was going to do a potential seminar on it. I was thinking about, like, play field swaps, but we'll see. I'm not sure. I don't think it will happen this year. Maybe it will be next year. But I'll probably bring a game this year again. Last year I brought Firepower, and I went in the Steve Ritchie room, and everybody really liked that. So I'll probably bring Firepower again, or maybe I'll bring Rack'Em Up or something. I'll probably bring one of my games just for folks to get a chance to play it. Fun. Fun should be fun. That's cool. I might bring one of mine sometime. I don't know. We'll see. Bring a pinball pool or maybe a $6,000 man. I don't know. It's possible. But I wanted to bring it to the Extra Ball Lounge, though. It would be great if my games could end up in EPL. I want it to be in the red velvet rope section. I was lucky with Firepower to end up in the Steve Ritchie room. That was really nice. I had Steve play it. Is that the coolest thing or what? You got a picture, too? I do, yeah. I have a picture of Steve playing my firepower. That's so cool. And I had him sign it. I had him sign the back glass and the apron. Nice. Isn't that awesome? He's such a great guy. He is a great guy. We interviewed him. I had him in the hotel room and he knew the whole thing. It was fantastic. Oh, I absolutely adore Steve. He's the best. He's awesome. But we'll sign off. This is Dr. Dave. I'm going to say stay lit, tilted, and stay healthy out there.
    95:21
    John, anything, John? any little last tidbit? Oh, I don't know. Just everybody just keep enjoying pinball. Let's keep pinball alive. And everybody just have a great time. Get your friends and family involved too. Amen to that. Cheers, everyone.