Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast. My name is Alan, host of the Wedgehead Pinball Podcast, one half owner of Wedgehead, a pinball bar in Portland, Oregon. Currently in the basement studio of my co-host, Alex the Waterboy. Howdy, this is Alex. you know, one half of nothing except for this podcast, I guess. Today, we're joined by a very special guest, someone who's done some of the most impressive restoration work on pinball machines I've seen in my life, Ashley Ludwig. Ashley, how are you doing today? I'm good. How are you guys? Doing good. We're very excited to talk to you. Yeah, this has been a long time coming, so I'm very excited to be here. You're one of my absolute favorite follows on Instagram. it's just the work you do is so impressive and for the listener that's what we're going to try to uh i was talking to alex before we got on here where i was like the thing about instagram and you is that you don't your instagram doesn't really tell the amount of work and difficulty and skill of what you do yeah like it's kind of rare to see because most of the time with social media i feel like everyone plays everything up and just knowing a little bit about pinball if you see just some of the before and after shots you've done, you're definitely downplaying everything because your work is incredibly impressive. For anybody listening that hasn't come across Ashley's account, it's Ludwig Synopsis on Instagram. You can go follow along. We mentioned anything specific in this episode and see some pictures. But yeah, it's crazy to see someone downplaying as much as you do just how much work this stuff is. It's crazy to hear you say downplay because sometimes I feel like I have to upplay it you know there's and I think in my stories a lot of times I'm trying to kind of maybe give a more intimate kind of look at wow my day-to-day crazy thing whatever it is I'm working on look at how disastrous this is or what I'm trying to do look at how terrible this thing is you know so yeah that's nice to hear yeah I think it's like when we go and look at your save post you know it all you're like oh yeah here's the final product Here's what it looked like before. And I'm like, just having to work on games. And I tried touching up paint on a few old EMs that I used to have, and it did not go like yours goes. And there's a true difference between, I think, pinball repair, which is something I do, and true restoration, which is what you do. And there's like a true art to it. So I guess we want to start off with like, how did you get into this thing? You clearly have, you must have some sort of art background. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, it's actually a really funny story. So I was a I was working for a major grocery store chain in Rochester, and I was with them for probably almost a decade doing sign painting. and I graduated from RIT. I had a degree in hand applying to jobs all over the country, getting no callbacks. And I started to get really nervous because art was what I went to school for. It's really the only thing I wanted to do, just applying, applying all over. But while I was working full-time doing that stuff, I would get on Craigslist and look at, you know, if there were any restaurants or anything local that needed maybe some window paintings or A-frames or signs of any sort. A lot of times they'd post to Craigslist, a couple hundred bucks in your pocket, do something kind of quick. And my boss was posting an ad, artists need to restore pinball machines. and I honestly thought it was like a murder plot I it was up for like 10 months and I kept it kept coming up and I'm like oh this is like such a scam whatever and I kept ignoring it and then I got desperate enough I was like you know what if it is a murder plot like yeah let's see yeah I'm like, I got desperate enough that I was like, you know what? I don't, I don't care. It ended up being real. And over time I kind of, you know, made the transition and eight years later, here I am. Yeah. That's awesome. It is awesome. So yeah, kids, if you're stuck in your career, you just start looking for sketchy ads on Craigslist. Yeah. That's the moral of this story. Yes. It could really change the course of your life for better or for worse. Who knows? Things will change one way. Roll the dice. Life's about taking chances, kids. Did I? Trace left. Yeah, that makes sense that you had kind of like a window painting, signs and stuff background. That makes a lot of sense. I was going to say, because we work with a lot of local sign painters to paint signs for Wedge, and the skill set seems very similar. Which is gorgeous. Whoever you have doing your sign work is top. I love that. There's multiple sign painters in Portland, and it's awesome because it's great to see. I just love getting hand-painted signs. There's really nothing like it. I wish it was an art that was more common nowadays still because everyone just goes and prints something cheap, and it just looks like shit. I don't know. You can always tell when somebody hand-painted something. Oh, yeah. And, I mean, a lot of that, it took dying out for the resurgence to come back. And especially, you know, we recognize that in the pinball field, you know, people start going for video console, home, home use, whatever. And then lo and behold, pinball has kind of come back. I want to get into some of the restoration work you do. And obviously this is an audio medium, but, you know, Ludwig Synopsys, like Alex mentioned, that's your handle on Instagram. So people can see some of your work and hopefully follow you. Can you go into some of like, when you get a game and you're going to restore it, everything's like, hey, Ashley, like we have this Atlantis that's on your Instagram right here. What do you do? What's the bill of work typically for those games? How does it vary? How does all that stuff work? How long does it take? Take us into that. We have a bunch of machines and storage that if someone wants to put a down deposit on, they can do that. We'll pull it out and start going through it for them. I don't really deal with the pricing on that. I just do the work. And then we have people that bring us machines. We could either repair it, get it working, kind of give it a once over, or we can restore it, which we have like set pricing for that. but it is just a matter of really kind of whether it's repair that's one thing we'll take care of all the issues but that's like an hourly charge in terms of restoration it's just kind of stripping everything down and doing whatever we can to just go through it mechanically artistically trying to bring it back to what it was when it came off the line well I guess what's so impressive to me is you do so much work on ems and listeners of the show will know em means electromechanical it's the old games before they had you know board systems solid state electronics what's very interesting is that those games like one got played a lot they didn't have clear coats on the playfields so the playfields are typically worn now but ems are also you know not super valuable it's rare to see an em it's like solid state games you see 10 grand games from the 80s even, and the newer ones, obviously, more than that. It's rare to see EMs that are that valuable, so it's very cool to see people actually, like, investing in them. Yeah, it's a lot of work that you put into these. I mean, when you're doing a playfield touch-up, like, let's talk about this Atlantis, or I saw that you did a Spanish Eyes, which is one of my favorite games of all time, like, when you did that playfield restoration, how long did that take? You know, it's really hard to say especially with that Spanish eyes geez that was maybe a year ago I mean they all blend together it's you know sometimes I can get through if there's light wear on a play field maybe I can just go through in one day and just kind of you know blend some color back in and it's enough to match it and your eye just glazes over everything and you don't see it right and then other ones it's kind of, you got to really take a hard look at it. Number one, is it cost effective? You know, am I going to put more time into this than it is worth? And we do get people that, you know, I had a customer bring a, I think it was one of those little granny grabbers. I can't remember the title but it was like maybe worth 300 500 really just cheap machine that just was worth nothing um but he said my dad bought this for me for christmas when i was a kid and he passed away and this is like so sentimental to me and i don't care what it costs i just want it to like you know what it was yeah when I was a when I was a kid so you know whatever that is and it's nice to see people care about that sort of stuff and kind of come to me to like bring it back to life for them yeah it's like the passion over reason kind of thing and that's awesome to see people actually care about this stuff yeah and in terms of price it's like it can get very expensive but some people just it doesn't matter and then you know for the majority of us out there it matters a lot so taking a hard look at you know geez is this play field going to be 80 hours of work is it going to be 50 hours of work like what is the max and yeah a lot of times we'll ask you know we'll take a look at it and just say you know hey for this price we could do it yeah it's it's always a ballpark it's hard to it's hard to put a number on it but it is nice when people just genuinely care so much about it that the price doesn't really match you know i would say that a lot of the games that you work on i imagine even the lighter restoration work that you do the game probably i mean unless they got it in a barn or you know like it was a great deal fine not working or whatever i imagine that most of those games probably aren't even worth even the basic color you know touch-up work the minor work that you would do but i think it's cool that people care so much because it's really cool to see an old game look new it's very cool to see them like scrolling through your instagram it's unreal to see so many of these ems just look like they came off the factory floor and i guess part of like for the value argument i know restored games when you get into this territory are definitely like they pull a massive massive premium over like a player's condition one because it is so rare to see them restore yeah i guess that's true if you take it to the show and you find the right person that loves the game that you just it's a niche audience for sure but i have seen some restored games that i first of all what's your guys's do you have a company name and how big is it that's my new question pivoting i work for a company pinball alley in uh rochester new york okay do you handle just like the just the paint and artistry stuff or do you get to handle like the mechanical? Like, I guess, what's your kind of scope of work on an average day? I'm going to say this, Alex. I've called her a tech before and she's taken offense to it because she'll post all these fixes that she does. And I was like, well, you're a tech too. And she's like, I'm not a tech. I'm an artist. I'm like, okay, I'm not saying you're not an artist. I'm just saying sometimes you do the grease monkey stuff like I do too. So I think you're capable of doing that. I am capable, but it's tough because I was hired as an artist. that's my main focus kind of over the years. I, at one point I had a really amazing technician who was just incredible with solid state, electrical, mechanical, tube radios, everything. There was nothing that he could fix and unfortunately passed away from cancer. And it was really tough because he everything I kind of learned mechanically was really through him and like he really helped fine tune me but I I wish that I was able to absorb so much more in that time but unfortunately haven really found a technician with that expansive knowledge that he had that has been able to stick around with the company I work for so currently I'm I'm kind of doing everything first of all yeah sorry to hear that that's tough but you've done an amazing job keeping that candle going and picking it up because yeah we've seen some of the fixes you've done you mentioned earlier your stories kind of have the nitty-gritty parts of this the the Instagram the hard posts or whatever are usually the pretty stuff and the story is the ugly stuff and some of the ugly stuff you've seen is about the worst shape I've ever seen pinball machines in you're underselling your abilities as a tech i would say if you that's what i always tell her and she's always like no i'm out of tech and i was like hey listen you're obviously an amazing pinball restoration artist there's no doubt about it but you are definitely a skilled tech just from what i've seen you do and i worked on lots of games i work on games every day yeah and i've never seen the hacky stuff that you deal with like and we deal with ems too i've never seen the hack together stuff i told you this in a message before but i have some like theory of like there had to be some operator in your region that must have just done crazy dangerous spliced wired hacks all over these games because it's it almost looks like a weird fingerprint and you see so many of them i mean if you work in pinball and you work in pinball repair You'll see some of that stuff occasionally, but you see so much of it. And it's just crazy to me. It's so bizarre because it was, I thought that was something that everyone experienced everywhere. And until you said, until you pointed out, we had that conversation, I was just, I was very confused. Like I've seen so many machines with like all of this weird splicing and all of this, hey my cousin's you know stepdad is a an electrician like he can fix this and then just goes in there and hacks it all up but it's just there's so many I've worked on hundreds of machines and it's just like I can't imagine it's like one operator or it could have been a tree of them like it could have been one operator who had another tech who worked in the shop with them or Or, you know, it could have been a family business, like a lot of old school operators were a family business. Like it is something that needs to be investigated. Regional hacking, repair work. And I would love to see, you know, areas and what's going on in different areas of machines. You deal with so many of them. I mean, again, this is going to be like a one long episode of like, you should follow Ashley on Instagram to see all this stuff because it's a very interesting. And I love that you also will show all the times you bleed when you're fixing games because I bleed all the time. So I feel like that's, that's something that nobody shows. I don't show it. But yeah, that's what you're paying for. Yeah. Like you're paying, you're paying, Ashley's like literally blood and sweat and tears on these games. I always joke and say, if your machine makes me bleed, it's like a $25 bloodletting charge extra on your belt. Which, if that was true, I'd probably be, well, I probably wouldn't be any closer to retirement than I am now. You might have a little extra money in my pocket. I want to get into a couple of these just sort of different types of the restoration work and different processes. I got an old, the only pinball restoration I ever had access to was Joshua Clay Harrell's old, this old pinball DVDs that he recorded, right? Have you seen those? I have seen those early on in my, you know, trying to figure out what I'm doing, kind of first few years of just throwing myself into this. like so he goes over some of his like you know ways of kind of restoring things and he is one of the most brilliant pinball technicians alive like truly a genius restoring is not what he usually does but he goes into that on some of those really old dvds when i say old i mean filmed in the early 2000s you know which is 20 years ago now but it's on low quality cameras and stuff and he's wearing a weird wig and doing accents and stuff and making weird jokes i just really gained an appreciation for the amount of work that goes into like cabinet touch-ups back glass touch-ups because i think what a lot of people don't realize is these games used to have varnish they didn't used to have a clear coat like all games now have a clear coat since like the early 90s so everything on for the last 30 years has had like a clear coat so the playfields typically hold up better we do get clear coat issues occasionally you'll see that but these old varnish playfields get a lot of wear and tear and they wear down to the wood they also all had incandescent lights incandescent lights create heat so they cause all the plastic inserts to dip and they also cause the paint on the back glass because the back glass is all used to be painted and actually made a real glass and they would get hot and they would flake off so a lot of the restoration work when people have is they're like oh this backlash is super flaked but you also can't just put paint on the back glass because there needs to be another layer there's usually like a silver film layer because you can't just have light going through because then you'll see bright light shining in your eyes right and it's with back glass it's like a density thing too if you just pull up paint on the back of it you can match the color but you pull it up and then you're looking through that density yeah of of that paint and it just looks you have to worry about lighting on it yeah off and yeah you can see brush strokes if you do it poorly that's what i had a problem with when i was trying to touch up a back glasses that i was doing my best to color match it like an idiot and but i couldn't like i was like not doing a great job and then obviously you're adding light so it changes the color and like ashley is saying the thickness of it but I couldn't figure out how to not get brush strokes and find that kind of happy medium of like I would do the same thing she's saying is like pull it a little bit more so that'd be thicker so it wouldn't have brush strokes but then it just it just drew more attention than it being flake right yeah and honestly the one thing I I don't like doing is a back glass if it has very minor damage i can just touch it here or there enough to like blend it but i can put some of the color in and then maybe i want to do like a a white base to help kind of diffuse the color as the light is shining through it to help just make it look a little bit more even but in general if it's really bad i'm not touching it at that point it's just it's Or if you can get just source a nicer one or find a repro or that makes sense. The back glasses are just too finicky. I don't know. Yeah. The only thing I ever did was I re-leveled some inserts and I around the inserts. They usually have like a black circle on the old EMS and they get worn out. Key lines. Yep. I've done that. I've re-blacked them and it was okay. It was not like what Ashley does. like looking at the yeah looking at the line work on that Atlantis you just did somewhat recently going off your feet or whatever that's insane to me that's why I was like I wonder if you did pinstripe work in the past or something signs make sense but it's just like to be able to do the line work on that Atlantis is just something I'm like now never ever in my life be able to do that yeah and it's tough because people always ask me oh what paint do you use how do you do this And people, pinball people will always ask me specific questions about how to do something. And honestly, at the end of the day, it's I try and convince people, you know, it's not about what you're using. It's how you're using it. And the only reason why I'm good at what I do is because I do it 40 hours a week for eight years straight. So if you're willing to, unless you're willing to like sell your soul for, you know, learning how to paint that many hours every single day, like it's not really feasible for the average person to just pick up something. And it's not really responsible for me to suggest or say, oh, I use this and this works for me because it's probably not going to work with you. It's more so your relationship with whatever you're using. And a lot of times it's understanding what I can do with something. And maybe I'm not using it as directed, but I know I have this relationship with it. I know I can spray it or maybe I could add alcohol to it. And when I spray it, it'll do something different than what it should. It's just that relationship with your materials more so than the materials themselves. Yeah, it's being a true craftsperson and understanding it through hours of expertise. That's what I mean is I think, even though I've already said that you have the best, my favorite Instagram follow of any pinball related account. I think sometimes you don't show how difficult it is. You have some of them where you're showing yourself drawing like lines with a thin brush, like a sign painter would show more of that. Like, I think that would demystify so many people. Cause like, Oh, this looks easy. If you see someone drawing a nice straight line in a circle or you know like a nice even black thick line in a circle with a long brush like that you're like oh i don't know i don't think i could do this yep right like you know what's even you know what's even harder i should have my phone recording that right but then i should have another recording watching me try to um set my own paint around the phone in the shooter lane and like a paint bottle shoved in the shooter lane so I can like get an angle right. And then I'm just like, my chin is like right next to my phone and I'm trying to like straddle it as I'm, you know, doing this very intricate thing. It's so difficult to film. Sure, yeah. Yeah, I'm picking up that the filming is maybe harder than the work. Yeah. It's another layer of complication, I suppose. Yes. And I like I hit record and then I'm just like breathing directly into my phone and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is this is I feel like people need to pay money for this because this is the pinball. Yeah, the pinball paint ASMR. Yeah, it's just me mouth breathing and like, you know, it's just it's a lot. Okay, so you said back glasses are the hardest. You find the most difficulty with them. So I think that's interesting. I didn't know that. That's, I guess, something I wanted to find out by talking to a pinball restorer like yourself. They never look good when you try to touch them up. For a couple hundred bucks, if you could just find another one, then you're better off. Do you ever do any, like, it has just started to flake, but it's overall pretty good? Do you ever spray like some sort of clear or some sort of kind of matte coat to like keep it in place so it doesn't flake further in the future? Yeah. Early on, I read, what is it? The triple thick. Yeah. Oh, spray it. Spray it with that. And I just I remember one time I had I had a back glass that just started to flake and I went to do that. And it just like the air pressure just like blew it apart. Oh, yeah. See, that's my fear. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, Oh my God. So I just I take my time and just I found just taking like a clear coat and just kind of lightly brushing on one layer first letting it set And then you could kind of build it up and protect it. But I'll never forget, like if this one just had a couple little spots in it and I just hit it with the aerosol and it just like blew apart. It was crazy. That's always my fear. It's like I've got a big game sitting here that the it's kind of got some flaking. It's workable. Like it looks fine. When you have the lights on, you realize it. And I've always heard like the triple thick and everything. And I'm just like, I'm kind of scared to touch it. I'd rather just brush. Yeah. OK, that's good to know. I also want to talk about you do a lot of cabinet work. So cabinets, you'll make your own stencils. I've seen you recolor cabinets for I'm assuming the customer wanted it that way. you also yeah but there's a lot that goes into like you again this is i think one of those things where it's the devil's in the details right like you're showing these cabinets and some of them are like cracked or split and so you're having to sand them and fill them and then you're pulling off all the trim all the metal trim so like a coin door the side rails and then you have to polish that i mean what do you do to get the steel back nice like how do you polish that and can you just describe like what redoing a whole pinball cabinet is and getting the overspray right and then you do the webbing like i think a lot of people don't know this but it's like on a lot of the em stuff it's they used to throw webbing like they'd be like kind of a off-white cabinet or any color and but there would be webbing in between in the negative space that's something you used to do so you can't just go in and just paint that all white like Yeah, and it took probably about five years for me to actually figure out how to do webbing correctly the way that I wanted to. And just trying to get the chemical mix right and just trying to figure out the air pressure and the flow and how to make it consistent. Because there's a chemical webbing solution that you add to paint. But you'll start spraying it and then it starts kind of clotting up. So it's hard to like balance the and keep the consistency right throughout it. But a lot of it is as soon as I get a machine in, strip it down, just, you know, legs off, coin door off. Just take all the major stuff off and really look at it. If it has cabinet damage that needs to get repaired, do that and then just start filling and sanding. And honestly, the filling and sanding is kind of the most important part because it doesn't matter how good of an artist you are. If you are painting on an unlevel surface, there's nothing that's going to cover that up. Yep. It's always the prep work, right, that gets you. Yeah, which is, it's tough. there's days where I'll just be filling and sanding all day long, but you got to do it. And if you're not willing to put that time into it, there's nothing you could do later on down the road. That's going to cover that. Yeah. So much of this just sounds like what I know of like car restoration. It's like, yeah, you have to kind of take inventory of what you got, strip it all the way down and then just start from there. And it's not, I don't know, just like that. It doesn't sound very fun. The prep works. The paint always looks pretty. And so the paint part is like, well, that looks fun. Like once you're good at painting, it has to be very rewarding to be like laying down paint and being like, oh, this is turning out great. But it's like the hours and hours and hours of like sitting there with a sanding block is always so miserable. Yeah, I mean, that's that's the reality of it. It's you don't get to do all the fun stuff all the time. You know, a lot of it is kind of paying your dues. Yeah. Do you usually like do you salvage the existing cabinets almost always or do you ever take them apart and you're like this thing's roached we're going to get a source a new cabinet for it. I guess like what's kind of like the save rate of the cabinets if you can ballpark it. Probably 99 percent. Okay. That's surprising because some again looking at like we've got some pictures up right now on the screen and it's just like man I would just be like we got to find a cleaner cabinet. But I guess once you're good at it. I say 99%, but there have been things that I have really just wanted to drag out the door and just, you know, office style in the back part of the lot. Yeah, you're just going at it with a baseball bat. Yeah, like it needs to get put down. Well, those are some of the, like, this is getting into nitty gritty stuff. I guess this is all nitty gritty. This is what this episode is. But like we have a couple Spanish EMs and they have like they have some like bad MDF cabinets like that are just like rotting apart. Yeah. And they have the best playfields because they had to. They had all the good chemicals over there, had all the good chemicals in Europe or whatever. That's that's sort of the going history of pinball is that they have looser regulations, but they put them in these, you know, particle board cabinets versus most of these pinball cabinets are, you know actual plywood so they are like reasonably strong and sturdy but i hate moving that anytime we move any of the sonic games in or out it's every time we move them it gets a little bit worse and we're like yeah yeah yeah sucks those particle it's the same it's the same with the arcade games that are made out of that oh yeah or they just start sucking up moisture and once it gets in it's just disintegrating water damage on the bottom of an arcade cabinet it's just like death because it's like okay it's just going to be rotting for the rest of time you skip put down yeah bring it all back another thing i want to talk about is on a lot of these old games maybe not as common on ems but certainly in the solid state era you would have operators sheets of clear plastic and that are adhesive and they would stick them over the play field we call that mylar uh so i want to talk to you about because i think a lot of people will run into this especially if you're a fan of solid state games like how do you deal with mylar because the problem with mylar is here's the thing is sometimes people will put it like day one mylar it's like an operator would get it they would put it right on so sometimes you could game ship with it yeah some games even ship with it in certain high high play areas or whatever but there's also what used to happen is it was already wearing through the play field and then they stuck mylar over it which is like the worst of both worlds and then also just the insert levelings like the inserts like i said will cup and they'll create you know an uneven play field and mylar will also create uneven playfields and that's the biggest thing as far as like the play of an old game is usually dictated by that and unless you do a full play field swap or i'm assuming you can do some of this restoration work, you know, time permitted and budget permitted, but it's like, how do you deal with old Mylar removing it? And how do you deal with like re-leveling inserts? So I think the absolute worst thing someone could do is have a worn down spot and then decide, hey, I'm going to try and touch this up with like whatever latex house paint I have, permanent markers, whatever. And they do, I'm sure they're trying their best, but it looks terrible. touch-up work and then they put a piece of mylar over top of that and it's like a crinkly unleveled permanent stamp on there and then it comes to me and I'm and I have to try and reverse that which always takes so much more time I wish they didn't touch it at all but it's tough because even some of the factory mylar when it starts to come up you'll start to get dust and stuff under there and it kind of acts like sandpaper against itself a lot of times you're gonna have to like cut it out and sometimes I can get away with looking at it maybe it's just like an edge or a spot that I can maybe put like a little swoop onto it so when I remove it clear off the the goopy whatever the boogers that are on it it blends in and kind of looks natural and of course there's a risk of maybe it wants to pull up the paint yeah maybe it wants to come off completely cleanly i actually found out something recently from a couple plate fields where i had to remove the entire sheet of mylar because they say you could try and like heat it with a heat gun that usually works well or freeze it. I've seen the freeze with like canned air, right? Yeah. And usually I'll use like a heat gun to try and melt it up and that kind of comes up fine. I actually found, I found this one technique where I just get a little bit of an edge on it and I just try to rip it off like a bandaid, which sounds terrible. Oh, like rip it fast. Rip it fast. And honestly, I'm not saying I'm not I'm not recommending it but I will say that that every time I've gone to do it since then it's come off perfectly that's awesome well there you go I mean if it works it works right just grab it like a just get like six inches of that mylar sheet both hands on it and just rip it off like a bandaid and that's after you hit it with the heat gun or not hitting it with the heat gun at all not hitting it with the heat gun okay wow nice okay fly you out here just to rip some mylar yeah yeah it's a i it's always a sight every time i go to do it i'm like this isn't gonna work and then i just like hulk hogan like rip it clean off and it's like wow that worked really really well okay noted huh that's surprising okay and and how do you deal with inserts or do what do you do or Or do you just leave it as like, it's just kind of how it is? If they're loose and they need to be re-glued in and lifted, that is, you know, something that needs to be addressed. If I can replace them, if they need to be replaced, I will do that. I haven't tried the pinball scientist, those little insert leveling things. Yeah, pieces of mylar. Sticker things. I haven't tried those yet, but I would like to. They seem like a very kind of user-friendly, easy solution to that, because insert leveling, it can ruin a game when they're cupped really poorly. Yep, and there's not much you can do. I mean, other than pulling the play field out and really going through it and sort of like you can kind of tap them out a little bit and then sand them and re-glue them in place, but then you need to polish them again so that the light shines through them like they did before. There's no real good solution to it. No, and sometimes I can maybe build up a little bit of clear, like pool it in that. Oh, yeah. But once again, is it going to be perfect? Not necessarily. So, yeah, there's a lot of different kind of solutions. but also just looking at, is it 20 of them? Is it one of them? Is it a weird sized insert? Sometimes you have to kind of look at the big picture of everything you got going on. Yeah. I've been chatting for a while. I want to talk to you from the art side of it. I think you have a very unique perspective. It seems like you get to work on a lot of machines. You're an artist. You're a sign painter. a lot of what pinball people really like about pinball is the art. It's the first thing that people will get upset about when a new game drops is the art. But you work so much on these old restorations of what I think is when pinball art was at its best. Yeah. At its peak in the EM era and into the early solid state era. And I just wanted to know if you have any artists that you particularly enjoy their work. How closely do you follow that Like are you a are you a nerd about the pinball history and the artists or do you have certain games that stand out i am definitely a fan of the older electrical mechanical machines i think a lot of the art coming out today with stern especially is very cool i love it but i am true and true like an em player and lover so like i absolutely love the artwork that roy parker did yeah for gotley Gordon Morison yeah abracadabra atlantis yeah um i my soft spot is gotley like wedgehead there we go artwork you heard it here folks I mean, honestly, it's just, it's so, it's beautiful. There's such a unity between the color scheme and the theme of it and the detail of it. It's something that really speaks to the era and it's gorgeous. It's something that, and I, there's a lot of like, I appreciate the solid state games And I love so many different eras of machines throughout the art group. I don't even know what I'm saying. Totally. There's good art in every era, right? Yeah. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. But it's like my heart is with old Gottliebs. I just, I love that. Do you have any that stand out as like restoration jobs you've had to do on a game that you hated doing for like whether you thought it's just a horrible art package and you're frustrated that someone bothers to restore it? Oh, that's a good question. Or just anything that you're just like, was a pain in the ass to restore in particular? Have you ever restored a game where you're like, this game is so ugly, I can't believe I'm doing this? That is a loaded question. Yeah, someone paid a lot of money for whatever it is. Well, I always say that there's a pinball for everyone. Yeah, it's subjective. I get people that just are obsessed about games that I absolutely hate. And I just don't get it, but I will just trudge through it. I was restoring three South Parks at the same time, which was terrible. Yeah, that's pretty bad. yeah and i i just why would anyone because that game people like that the only defense i've heard for that game is it earns well so i always like it but i'm like who wants a restored south park three of them at the same time and they were all oh yeah there you go oh yeah there's a picture of you in a cabinet in the south park yeah i think i think i said something about like you know when i die bury me in it yep yeah oh that's funny okay south park that would be one i would be annoyed to have to work on a south park that long let alone three of them yeah or now any any f-14 where i just like shred the back of my hands i mean but any machine that's super hacked up or just like in absolute terrible condition something that you're just trudging through and you're trying so hard to bring not just to a great condition but an okay condition is like that can really bring you down sure i know that my business partner rodsey who's been an operator for 20 years he's he will get so upset he does almost all pinball but he's taken on some accounts where they wanted some arcade cabinets and some like newer arcade cabinets and like he'll bring in like a mario kart or whatever and he will just bitch and moan for a week or more about having to move a game that's going to make a shitload of money right and never really break like and i'm like dude you were bitch he's like it's because he hates the game like he doesn't respect the game at all like he hates it so like the work to do it he hates it and i understand that because like when a pinball machine breaks that i like i'm all like all right we got to get this back up it's the gem of the collection it's this thing i gotta fix it's my baby yeah when it's a game i don't like i'm like pissed like alan will sit there and work for eight hours to fix the fucking gun on dirty harry and never once complain yeah he has to take 10 minutes to like change a coil stop on a stern he's like what the fuck yeah it's true if it's a game i don't like like if i have to fix a deadpool one more fucking time like i swear to god like i hate like i hate working on deadpool but everyone loves that game and it you know it's a great game for most people i just hate always pulling out the broken scoop switch that happens on it all the time like i just uh anyway not to get too far into it but it's just it's very true it's funny so true though yeah it's funny how like when you like a game the difference of like your experience working on it is so much different that's what i was gonna say also too we we just expect you know a stern to come out of the box and just be just working yeah very true like we're oh my ems i expect them to need some help along the way and if they're if they don't break down every week it's like you give them a little smack on the on the backbox you know oh great job like you know they're expected to break down but god forbid uh new stern needs a coil stop after you know 2 000 plays i'm not happy about it yeah exactly a fix that takes like five minutes is not hard at all yeah i could probably do it with my eyes closed yeah i was going to say on the reverse side of that coin are there any games that you would do anything for do you have any that you're like oh yeah i will save any piece of shit copy of this game because i love it so much yeah what are some of your favorite got leave ems oh boy that's a tough one um gosh man my friend recently got a surfside oh nice yeah and i don't think i've ever seen or played one before but I saw it he just got it at Rochester Pinball Collective um set up they're doing an expansion over there and he it's one of the new machines I think he got maybe an Allentown or something and I looked at it and I just totally fell in love with it whoa that's a cool one I did not I was thinking of Surf Champ Surfside's very cool with like the double flippers side yeah yeah and a friend of mine had recently gotten me into sailing so that's fresh on my mind and so seeing this whole scape of these boats and the gameplay of it and i just i love that era and the color scheme and how the wood on the dock by the flippers is the actual wood grain. That is very cool. It's the detail stuff. That's one thing the EMs like integrate the wood the actual like playfield wood and the wood grain especially into the artwork sometimes and it's so cool. It's just one of those things you never see again outside of that era. Yeah yeah like uh ship ahoy yeah those little flourishes is just so beautiful with the wood grain showing through. I'd do anything for an old Gottlieb with some wood grain showing through the air. Good answer. Good answer. I have a soft spot for those Gottliebs, too. Obviously. That's why we called it Wedgehead. I think it's funny that there's a lot of people that are new to pinball and maybe it was playing a new Stern machine at a brewery or something and then they're, maybe I'll buy a game and they're looking at some 90s games or something to get for a little bit cheaper. more modern type of game with you know the longer flippers and ramps and modes and stuff like that and then they see probably a Gottlieb machine from the 90s for sale and then they go oh well these games are just trash like Gottlieb has like this period where their fall from grace you know through the 80s and into the 90s is well documented and it's hated amongst pinball fans of a certain type of pinball and it's hard to like explain to people that I'm like Gottlieb was the best like they were the best by a lot like you play the the bally's and the williams now there are good games from each of those but alex and i yeah your average bally williams em versus your average gottlieb is not even close not not even fucking close like almost every gottlieb em is pretty good or there's some fun in it there's a lot of bally's and williams that and i like ems but there's a lot of them that are just not worth playing at all in my opinion like and and some of the art's still good but there's a lot of them where the art's not very good either and then and then he just shows like this whole thing of like god leaves are just the best like yeah if you're into electromechanical games god leaves are the best they don't have the best maybe uh like flipper feel because i think williams had the best flipper feel from the em era but like Anyway, I think that was a fun conversation about pinball restoration, and I hope we tried to – the goal of the episode was to, one, get people to follow you on Instagram and see the beautiful pinball restoration work you do, and two, to try to make people understand how much work that is and really how much of a passion it has to be not only for a skilled artist like yourself to dedicate her time to doing it, to work for a company that facilitates it and to have customer base that wants to put the money and energy into doing that because that's not common yeah restoration on ems like this not common at all so i think it's so cool to see it and i love following you i thank you for joining us on the show we appreciate it thanks for having me anytime but i'll end this episode like i always do, which is to implore people to go out and play some pinball. If you're in the Rochester area, you can go and play at this Pinball Alley, is that right? Your distributor? We are a Stern distributor. We just sell machines, but I would highly recommend people in Rochester to check out Rochester Pinball Collective over in East Rochester. They currently have 50 machines and they're expanding. So they're going to almost double their collection. Here we go. Which is happening very soon. That's awesome. All right. The Rochester Pinball Collective. If you're in upstate New York, I'm sure you've already been. For everyone else, maybe it's worth taking a trip out to. For anyone else listening on the rest of the part of the country, go out and try to find some EMs, particularly some of these old Gottlieb EMs, and go out and play them because that's what this is all about. Going to play some pinball on location, having a good time. And until next time, good luck. Don't suck. I'm in an emergency Cause I've got to be free Free to face a life that's ahead of me I'm bored, I'm the captain So climb aboard We'll search for tomorrow On every shore And I'll try Oh Lord, I'll try To carry on