This is Mlandomalari on Space Station Babylon 5. The year is 2260. The internet travels through space, much like sound does. And Babylon 5 is just receiving topcast for the very first time. We have learned we can use this to scare small children or to put mental patients into an almost commotal state. Thank you to Topcast for all you've done. Space Station Babylon 5, checking out. Celebrity boys and personnated, you're listening to Topcast, this old pinballs online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com. Flash Topcast. Music Tonight at Topcast we're going to be talking to Michael Sands of the Sands Mechanical Museum in California. Michael does museum quality, electro mechanical, game and pinball restorations. And we're going to talk to him about his restoration process for electro mechanical games and how he gets started in the business. Special guests, special guests, special guests, special guests, special guests. So let's give Michael Sands a call right now and talk to him. Sands Mechanical Museum, this is Michael. Michael, it's Joshua Clay. Hey, how you doing? Good. How did you get involved with the coin-operated game coin restoration? It started with I was doing some research with NASA and I was simulating airplane planning on runways. And one of the displays that I was responsible for creating was sort of a radar view of planes flying around above the airport. There was a video game called a mega-rafe which had sort of a sane look and feel and I found one and thought it'd be cool to have something in my home that was similar to the work that I was doing. And I bought it and played with it for a while. One day my girlfriend and I were playing getting ready to go out and killing some time and I said, you know, don't you like this game? Isn't it cool? And she said, yeah, I grew up with pinballs. I'd rather have a pinball. So my idea was to get her a pinball machine for Christmas. I went out and found one, an old electro mechanical and bought it and thought this is pretty cool. What was the name of the game? Drop a card. Oh, okay, cool, got it. Yep. And then I proceeded to find an operator that was going out of business and I bought three more. I ended up marrying the girl and she's now helping me with all the restoration work. But restorations ran in your family too, right? Yeah, my mother, after the kid to doll flown the coup, decided even before that, when she was young she wanted to be a watch repair person. But her father said, you know, you'll never be able to make any money at that. You know, you need to go out and get a real job. She eventually became a professor at the university who was teaching German. When the kids were gone, she decided to find something to occupy her time. And so she started with a watch and clock collection and then proceeded to learn how to work on them herself. And helped me along at the very beginning. A single mom raising a kid. She taught me how to solder. She taught me how to do wiring. She taught me how to do a lot of metal work and cleaning and stuff like that. Now, when did the whole Sands Museum come about? Yeah, I'm not sure how I managed to do that. It's getting more exciting even as we speak. I think what happened, the only game I remember as a kid was Shoot the Bear, Seabird. And I remember going to an arcade in Houston, Texas with my grandparents and seeing a row of these that were being operated. And I really wanted, I desperately wanted to play in, but my grandparents didn't like the idea of shooting a gun and stuff like that. Didn't quite understand it, so I wasn't allowed to. And I advertised in some magazine and Dennis Doe del found the game and called me up and said, you know, Michael, you want it? And I said, sure, he delivered it because that was in the days that he was driving around delivering thermal machines. And it just happened that he got me a beautiful version, cosmetically in great condition, even mechanically in good condition. So I painstakingly restored it. I didn't understand it very well, but taking it apart and looking at how things moved and where the where patterns were. I finally got it to work and I had a little bit of trouble with it electrically, not in electrician. But I got it up and running and then I wrote this three part article for Game Room Magazine about the restoration. And suddenly I was getting all these calls from people saying, you know, will you do mine? Will you fix mine? And I thought, oh, I'll be an interesting idea, but I've got this. I was working in the high tech here in Silicon Valley and I didn't really have time to do work for other people, but I sort of kept it in the back of my mind. I was getting tired of doing software. Software is one of those things that you can't touch and feel, you know, sort of in your mind and in the computer's memory. But there's nothing much that you can get your hands dirty with. And eventually I got to a position where the high tech firm I was with didn't need me anymore and I sort of surplus myself and said, okay, I'll do a couple of these games. So I did a couple and people started asking me to do other stuff. They saw the quality of my work and said, well, do this other game for me. And I've been doing it ever since. Now you concentrate on electro mechanical stuff, right? I mean, you just to give people an idea, Seaburg shoot the bear came out just after World War II. It was a rail like gun game where you had a gun that was basically a big flashlight and then you had a separate stand that had a bear that kind of ran around some scenery. And you shot him, he went up on his hind legs and growled and the growling noise was all handled by a Seaburg, basically jukebox amplifier. Right. Right. In fact, some of the parts are shared. The credit unit is the same as found in the jukebox as well. But it intrigued me just because shooting a ray of light across the room had all sorts of implications. In fact, the original company was formed to help train our troops during the war to shoot. A live ammunition was expensive and so they thought there must be a technological way to teach everybody how to shoot accurately. And train the troops, find out who the good shooters were and who they weren't and then let them practice later on with live ammunition. So the shoot the bear was was exciting for me. It turned out later on that there was actually a connection with my family that I didn't discover until much later. What do you mean? What kind of connection? Well, my parents actually during the World War II World War my father was a physicist and he was working in a psalmist on the atomic bomb. And some of his responsibilities were to design electronic circuits that were needed. Some of them to detect the radiation. One of them was to instrument the bomb. The bomb was supposed to go off above ground before it hit the ground so that the destruction would be much wider. And he designed a set of radio controls that would signal how high the bomb went off. And at the end of the war they wanted to declassify a lot of that electronic circuitry. And so the atomic commission had commissioned some books. One of the books was an electric electricity book and my father co-authored it. So later on, progressed to today when I'm restoring these games. And I was having problems with a particular shoot the bear and happened to mention it when I was visiting my father over dinner one night. He said, well, why don't you bring down the circuitry and I'll take a look at it with you. A couple days later I brought it down and he poured over the schematic and he rewrote it in sort of his form and muttered to himself and did some equations. He needed to ask me some questions and he kept on going and he worked on it for about an hour and a half. And he got to the end and he said, oh, you know, I apologize. You know, we didn't spend any time figuring out your problem. Why don't you come on back another time and we'll go over it. So a week later I went back and walked into the house and he opened up this book and he showed me a circuit that was printed in the book and it was the 2050 which is a cybertron. It's a tube that acts sort of like a relay, solid state relay that we have today. And I looked at it and I recognized it as part of the circuit that was in shoot the bear. Well, apparently what had happened is the designers of the shoot the bear amplifier had read his book and had found the cybertron circuit and used it as the circuit to trigger the shot count and the hit count for the amplifier. And I thought it was a sort of a nice twist that something my father had documented and put into the public sector had found its way into a game and that now I was restoring that game. He was very pleased to. He was very excited to see me working on these games and was asking all sorts of questions. So I mean this was kind of like a full turn around was he did you get it to the point where the game was working and you let him play it. He has never played one. He's old enough now so that it doesn't like to travel. He lives about 45 minutes away over a mountain pass or a hill pass. He's sort of on the coast in California and I'm on the inland part. He's never actually played one but everyone's in a while I'll have a small game. You know that I can put in the car and transport down to him just recently I filled a finished a little table talk, table top shocker, a little electricity game. And I took it down and showed it to him and he was rather sent to play it. He didn't look forward to the shock but he's gotten a chance to share some of my games. I didn't take down the Kuhnhun amplifier and the Silascope and we looked at some signals that were going around inside of that. So he's got a chance to get his hands dirty a little bit but he's never ever played one of the games. Just to let people know that Kuhnhun is another Seaburg Ray O'Conn style game that came out in the mid-50s where you had two Kuhns or Rat Kuhns going up and down a tree. And when you would hit them they would kind of back off the tree and squeal and it was really kind of an updated version of Shoot the Bear. Yeah I think that was one of the, that was sort of the last Ray O'Conn that Seaburg came out with and I think they overextended themselves with that. I think the Kuhnhun gear train I call it a transmission is probably one of the most complicated mechanical devices that ever made it into the... There are two sets of planetary gears which reverse rotation you know from one direction to the other. There's a spiral cut gear there are two clutches, a bunch of rats. And for the amount of animation you get I think it was very very complicated and it was very difficult for the operators to keep running. I think they got frustrated with it and I even heard a rumor that they destroyed bunches of these because they could never sell them. So what other type of games have you read? Now well just a backup one more step. So you got so interested in this and you stopped working for the software company in Silicon Valley. Now you have your own company called the Sands Museum where you do you know restoration for other people right? Most of the work that I do I think I try and focus on games that nobody wants to work on anymore or nobody is familiar with. There are a bunch of games that are pretty rare and rather than create a process that lets me refurbish hundreds of shoot the bearers. I don't think there's that many out there that need my work and my tender loving care. I sort of focus on games that there are only ones or two or that nobody is willing to work on anymore. Many of the electrical technicians today that are practicing are familiar with polyester electronics but there are very few people who are familiar with two electronics. And most of the ones that are familiar with two electronics are probably retired by now. So I enjoy probably the range of games that the museum likes to restore is probably from 1930 up until about 1960. Anything newer than that we don't get much joy out of and I think there are other people who can probably do those better than I can anyway. So I like to pick and choose the restorations that we want to do. The other problem is that once I have a sort of a core set of customers and once they see the quality of my restoration work they don't want me to do other work. And so I have my hands full just trying to complete the restorations that I've gotten in front of me from my existing customers. Well what type of stuff are you working on right now? Actually what started me in all this as I mentioned at the beginning was the pinball and I haven't done a pinball in ages. I just finished a happy go lucky. I got a chance to do one to the top of my ability. It was a fairly rare game and so this one had experienced a little bit of wear not extensively. It was probably in medium condition. So we got to touch up the play field and clear code it. I've worked a long time trying to get rid of the ball track at the top so that it would roll down smoothly. And then we touched up the cabin a little bit. The work that we do we try and retain as much as the original patina as possible. But we have a bunch of techniques that allow us to reduce the amount of glaring problems. You know, initials carved in the side or the wear around the flipper button that's caused by people's rings or people bashing the button a lot. We have some techniques using the airbrush and my wife is extremely good at color matching. And then we protect areas of high wear like kick out holes and stuff like that on the play field so that they don't wear anymore. And in rare cases we will have to do a cabinet repaint. So the kind of work that I don't like to do is cabinet repaint or re-crowing or making a game look newer or better than it was when it left the factory. The ideal for us is to make a game look as much as possible like it's been played and enjoyed for six months or something like that. It's been out on location and it has the patina of a game of the stage. Well, let's take your happy go lucky which is a 1952 I believe got leave Woodrail single player game. And it is a rare game and a difficult game to find. Let's start with that. Let's go through that whole kind of sequence of what you do beginning with like the stepper units and the real a's and whatever. What is your approach here? Part of this is you know comes from a discussion with the customer the client that I'm doing the work for. They vary in their desire to have it very original or not modified as much as possible. In this case the customer wanted it to play really well. Well, one of the problems with happy go lucky is that the relays are the solenoids are usually in blur acer steel sleeves. And therefore it's difficult to keep them moving smoothly or easily. One of the big improvements that came later was the nylon sleeve. So all the solenoids were swapped out for nylon sleeve solenoid coil. You did every single one of the coils you swapped out for the yeah because just to explain to people. Prior to I think is somewhere around 5758 all the coils in the got leave EMS like you said they have a brass sleeve. So instead of having a replaceable coil sleeve the windings of the coil are actually well directly around the brass sleeve. And you cannot pull the brass sleeve out of the coil without ruining it. And you know one got you know can think that make a game play better would be to replace the sleeves with new nylon versions. But the problem with the new nylon version coils is they have a completely different look to them. The bobbins again are not fiber based or they're nylon based and you've got a nylon sleeve and they just look different. I mean was that acceptable to the customer? That was a very good point. Some of the customers want the look to be exactly the same when you raise the play field and look underneath. Some people could care less about what goes on underneath there. In this case you're absolutely right. You're making a trade-off between the original appearance and what I would say is not necessarily an improvement in the immediate play but an improvement in the reliability. You can make the steel sleeves. You can clean them out or brass sleeves. You can clean them out sufficiently. I use detergent of all things. It's got a little bit of abrasiveness to it and a bottle brush. If you go back and forth through there you can get the sleeve to be fairly smooth. All you need to do is make sure that the solenoid itself, the core, is smooth as well. Over time the metal of the plunger starts galling the inside of the sleeve and you need to clean it again. In this case the customer is a player and enjoys a nice smooth game. For the interest of reliability we went ahead and replaced them. On the other hand you can, I think the coils that I got from Steve Young, who everybody probably knows, one of the best suppliers pinball resource. The wrappers on these coils were black, the same. The only difference in appearance is the end caps of the coil in this case were nylon rather than the original fiber. I buy stuff from Steve. I find that a trick you can do sometimes that's really cheating is to transplant the old coil wrapper from the original coil onto the new coil. Yep, I've resorted to that on occasion as well. The other thing I do that a lot of people don't do is I will disassemble every mechanism completely and totally. It's one thing to disassemble for example the flipper assembly and put in new flipper links because oftentimes those have been worn a little bit round and there's a little bit of play in the flipper which reduces its speed. It's a smooth stroke. It's something else that a lot of people don't do which is completely remove every single piece from a score unit. I take them completely apart and wire brush all the contacts and then I do use some modern materials in order to improve the reliability as I mentioned before. One of the things I do is I coat the surface of the contact bar with a Teflon lubricant making sure that it will stay smooth and reduce the amount of wear on the brad as much as possible. You're talking about like on any sort of rotating set of fingers against a bakelite stationary board with the brass rivets you coat that with a thin film of Teflon gel loop. Exactly. What not only do I want to preserve high wear spots on the cosmetic portions, for example around the flipper buttons or where the ball hits or gets kicked out or something like that but I also want to preserve where where there's metal on metal. As you know the lubricating internal parts inside the Pimbal machine is a bad thing to do because it attracts all the dirt and everything else and then it becomes an abrasive paste and probably wears twice as fast as it would have if you just left it dry. But there are some modern things that don't attract the dirt that allow you to reduce the amount of wear and even though the Pimbal machine will probably last yours or my lifetime. I'm looking forward to trying to get these things to last probably 10 or 15 lifetimes if they're maintained carefully. Yeah I think a lot of people don't realize that these machines are you know that we're just temporary gatekeepers for them that they are going to be around a lot longer than we are. We'd certainly like them to be. There are you know there's the as it's my name is the Sam's Mechanical Museum I get some interest from other museum curators who are asking my advice on how to do things. And there are some people who have sort of a different approach than I do that's even more radical or dramatic. One fellow believes that as you say we're sort of custodians of these beautiful American art pieces and they shouldn't be played. Any play will cause wear and will reduce their desirability in you know 100 years from now and so his attitude is let's preserve it you know it's called conservation and we'll you know put it in a glass box and take all the moisture out of the air and people can file by and take a look at it. And I think that I think that's probably not the kind of restoration or conservation I want to do I want people to enjoy these I want them to be played I think that's half the enjoyment. Yeah I agree too I mean my personal collection is is more along the lines of your happy go less lucky customer I mean you know I don't replace all the coils unless you know the brass leaves are actually been worn through or there's some problem where I just can't. You know I find that coils are more than just you know a hunk of wire creating some form of resistance are also inductors and as an inductor over time you know the Henry's change and by sometimes just putting a new coil in even though it's the exact same resistance as the coil is replacing it will perform better because the old coil as an inductor is as broken down and just doesn't work as well. It's a delicate line that I walk I always recommend to people when they're looking for a person to do work on their game looking to do a restoration that they find somebody who is who enjoys or who does the same kind of work that they're looking for. You want to be able to meet the customers expectations and different customers have different things that they want. I had one fellow who who love to have a whole series of games but all he would do is turn them on and look at them you know they would make pretty bright lights and he'd have them in his living room and they provide an ambient light source for him almost like visible art. Other people want it to play exactly as it did in the old days and don't want any any mechanics replaced at all you know they want the original coils in there they want the original brass or brass or still sleeves in there and they you know they want it to play with its little the osin crises. So you need to find somebody who is interested in willing to do the same kind of work that you want done on your machine. There are people who want their games to be re-crumbed and repainted and I'm not a good guy for doing that need to find somebody else who specializes in that kind of work. Another common thing is people get frustrated with the shoot the bear when you're shooting a ray of light across and you're using old two amplifiers people will point the guns straight down at the ground and pull the trigger and find that the bear reacts and the hit is recorded and they say what's that all about you know I didn't shoot the bear and yet the game still thinks that I scored. And I in this modern day of computers and video games we all expect perfection we all expect it to behave exactly the same well there's some there's some legitimate reasons why the amplifier recorded a hit when you're pointing down. And you could replace the gun could be replaced with a laser light inside of it instead of that filament bulb that's in the back of the barrel and you could replace the electronics with a bunch of transistor electronics and you could use radio frequency to synchronize everything up and it would play much more accurately much more perfectly. But in my mind I remember kids going up to games like this and a guy would swagger up to with his girlfriend and everybody else would be getting you know five or six hits and he'd go up there and he'd get a perfect score and the reason he got a perfect scores he would sit there and play the game often enough to learn it to idiosyncrasies and then he was king of the mountain you know he could go up there and show off and be the best. That's actually pretty funny. So what type of what has been your most challenging restoration that you've done for a client. You know it's funny sometimes the simplest game will be the biggest challenge. When it comes to mind an old style 1930s pinball machine and it was a baseball scene and it had little gates that would hold the ball and they would hold the ball at first, second or third. And then for example if you got a single it would hold the ball at first and then if you got another signal the ball the second runner would come up to first base and it would raise the gate a little bit and release the runner that's already on first and that guy would progress on to second and where he would be held. The problem is singles and doubles would be scored just fine it would keep the runners in sequence and they would run around the base correctly. The ones that were a problem is a home run. The home run would come running down and he'd release the runner at first and he'd sprint ahead and he'd release the runner at second. Meanwhile a poor little runner at first was still trying to catch up and he'd be held at second because there was no ball to trigger the release there. Anyway if people are curious they can go to my website and there's a in the mechanisms part there's an animation that shows what the problem was. Well I was frustrated because I expected the home run to clear the bases. One of the pieces of research that I do is I go to the patent database and I look up the game and I read the patent and I try and understand what the designers wanted for the game. The designers had done this special little ramp on the gate to make it so that it would last longer and hopefully the runners wouldn't get ahead of themselves. Well I went ahead and implemented the patent on the gates rather than the way I found the game. It still wouldn't play right. I went and visited my father, the physicist and said look we've got momentum from the balls that are triggering the release and how do we slow the ball down without stopping it and how do we make it reliable. We noodled on this, I bet we worked on this for over a month and we still couldn't get it to work and I finally had to give up but that is probably the most frustrating thing of all is that when the game is poorly designed enough so that it never really did work right. But you can see the potential, I can imagine what the designers felt like when they couldn't quite get it to work right. If you look at the Rockle of World series they solved the problem by having a rotating diamond and this other game we never did get it working right. So it's the simple things you know it's not the hard thing. The simplest games can be the one that caused you the most problems. We're going to take a break from our talk with Michael Sands at the Sands Mechanical Museum and we'll be right back after this message. Hey George, I just had to call and tell you about this really great magazine I got. It's called the Ping Game Journal and it's the only magazine dedicated totally to Pinball. It's got great articles and interviews with designers and everything. No George, I won't lend you my copy. Who knows what you'll take it to. You're going to have to go to PingGangeral.com and get your own subscription. But George, the guy says that each issue will give mail whenever he feels like it. What's the deal with that? Alright George, I got to go. Got to call Elaine and tell her I can't believe how good this magazine. Alright, we're back with Michael Sands of the Sands Mechanical Museum. We've also done some gambling games too, right? Like some Paces Races type stuff. Tell me about that. My own collection started off as Pinball. Probably at one point I had pretty close to 40 and we did a home remodel so that I had a game room and I could probably set up at least 30 of them. But when I started restoring games for other people, my games didn't have much meaning for me anymore. I didn't have time to work on them. I was working on client games and I was enjoying that. In fact it was kind of nice. People would send me a game. I get to work on it, restore it to perfect condition, play with it for a while, get tired of it, and send another way. And people would actually pay me for the privilege. So a lot of Pinball went left. However, I do have, for example, I have a Paces Races. I have an Evans Races. I have the first one in the last one. And I enjoy the complexity of those. To me those were sort of the epitome of collecting or sort of like the Rockle Low World Series 1937. Sort of the best of the best. And again, people are having difficulty finding anyone who understands those games and is willing to work on them. The gambling games, to me, are probably the most fascinating. I mean at this point if I still wanted to buy a game I would love to have a dice game. Buckley Bones or a mill dice or something like that. They're mechanically fascinating. But I end up working on slot machines. Some of the pinball payouts that were attempts to get by the laws against slot machines. Mill's Railroad was a good example or a Jennings Sportsman. These were pinballs that implied that there was skill in the game. But really they were just glorified gambling games that if you got a certain combination they would pay out, spit out nickels out the back, round at the bottom. And then the Evans Races is another game that I really enjoyed working on. Well let's talk about the Buckley Bones. I've never played one. Only seen one in real life and I wasn't allowed to touch it. How does that game work? Oh you don't want to ruin the magic. Any magician that tells you how the trick is done takes away all the fascination and the excitement. I mean the way it works from a player's perspective is just like playing a game of crabs. You bet on a certain combination and then you pull the handle and the dice get rattled out there in front of you in that little window. If you hit the right combination it pays out and if you miss then you crap out. So are you saying you're not going to tell us how it really works? I don't know. Do you think I should play? I know a good magician doesn't give away his tricks but you're not really the magician here. Yeah but what I'm doing is I'm relating to sort of the first time I got a chance to play one. San Diego John had a couple of them and a friend of mine took me by his place to look at some of the restorations and some of the games that he had. I looked at it and I consider myself fairly a stucchanically and he played it a couple of times and I got to play it a couple of times and I was just blown away because the machine knew exactly what the dice were showing and I said how in the world can it tell that it's showing a 7. There's just no way. Well okay for those of you that don't want to know the secret. Yeah, tune off right now but just to give people an idea Buckley Ballens was made in the mid 30s. It's like a tabletop game. It has a little arch dome that holds two dice in it and you're basically when you pull the lever the dice, the dice, you know it's like somebody rolled the dice and the game knows where they roll. Buckley Ballens is similar and that there's a little window and you can see the dice through the window and you pull it. They look very much like fought machines. You pull the handle and the dice bounce around a little bit and come to land. The game knows what it rolled and gives you a payout or not depending on whether you want or not. For those that don't want to know put your fingers in your ears and hum for about 10 seconds. The combinations of dice are actually hidden in little pockets in the game and they get swept out into the window. Bounced around a little bit but you'll notice that there's actually the ground where the dice are landing and then there's a little piece of glass just above the dice and they can't actually roll or all I can do is bounce but they can't turn from what they are originally. Because they were picked out of a pocket the game knows exactly what set of dice it threw out there into the window and it does it so quickly that you can't tell that it swept out the dice that were originally there and swept in a new set. So are you saying that there's actually like a glass slide, like a glass sandwich with a pair of dice and there's multiple sets of these dice with a fixed set of numbers? Every combination of dice is set in a set of pockets and so every combination is in the game and it like a slot machine that has real it rolls and decides which set which pocket to pull the dice out of and throws them out in there into the glass in front of you and you think oh you know the dice rolled to that combination. Whereas all it did is pick a pocket and whatever combination was in that pocket is now shown in the glass in front of you and all the other dice are hidden in pockets. All the other combinations are hidden in pockets on a set of not a real or around the circumference of the square. Now how come these dice game are so difficult to find today? I would think that would have been a really popular item back in the 30s. It's interesting that the more complex, if you look at people in a gambling establishment, a lot of people just want to be a drone, you know put in your coin, pull the thing. Anything that's complicated or takes a little bit of thought or takes on any amount of time, I think people get bored with. For example the horse race games, they're pretty rare, they're complicated, they take a lot more time to run a combination and decide whether you get paid out or not. So I think probably the dice games probably had that same problem. Also a lot of people enjoy the thrill of letting somebody, excuse me, letting somebody else roll the dice so that you can always go to the craft table and pretty much play the same thing. Yeah but it's too cool, I'd love to find a Buckley Ballons, I've been looking for years and have never been able to find one. Yeah I've seen probably two or three go by a year maybe four. Now when you say the Sands Mechanical Museum, do you actually have a storefront where people can walk in and see your games? Funny you should say that, you know with all these new GPS systems and all these points of interest that have been recorded inside the GPS, it's not unusual for us to get a call saying, you know, I'm in the neighborhood, we'd like to stop by the museum, what are your hours? How much is the admission? Or will even, I've even had the occasional knock on the front door. No, it's actually our home, we're in the middle of a residential area. I probably described the Sands Mechanical Museum as more of a virtual one, games that have come in, that we've restored, are documented, mechanisms are documented, and then we try and put them on the web. I'm not quite as prolific as you are Joshua Clay but I try and keep adding new machines to our website. We do, if somebody is interested in a restoration or if a celebrity wants to come by, they're more than welcome. Just give us a call, let us make sure we're still here and we'll be glad to give you a tour. I may be prolific but I'm not doing what you're doing. I mean you're doing, you know, what would be categorized as museum quality restorations. I'm probably doing, you know, there's sometimes I do that but a lot of times I am doing stuff. For instance, I don't repay cabinets like you don't like to repay them, I like to maintain their originality. Even if they're worn but if they're original, I prefer that style of game. You know, there's some people and this may be your camp where like on a stepper unit you take the whole unit apart and you either are using an ultrasonic clean air to clean the parts or you're bead blasting them and reassembling them. I tend to not go to quite to that level of depth. I have to admit that that is compulsive. As I said, you need to find somebody who's going to do the kind of work that you're interested in doing. The problem with doing it to that level not only is it expensive because it takes a lot more time to get something to do that clean. But it also, I find that once I take something so completely apart, I'll find out how it really works. You know, the actual parts that rub against each other. The equivalent in a clock is when you look at some of the escapements, the part that goes tick-tock, the angles that the metal meets it and then pushes on something and gives it an additional impetus and then catches it to keep it from going. Those things have always fascinated me. Why does something work the way it does? By disassembling it completely, I can look at the wear patterns. I actually wear a magnifying glass, practically the whole time that I work or certainly when I'm reassembling something. Because I want to see it very close at what's happening. And as a result, I'd like to think, this is stretching it a little bit, but I'd like to think that a lot of the stuff that I put back together again is going to last for a really long time, especially in home use. Since I've gotten off all the old cake lubricant and dirt and grit and everything else, and I've replaced it with something fresh that my hope is is that in the home use it'll keep going for another 10, 15, maybe even 20 years. I think that you certainly will meet that 20-year objective. I know in the games that I've done, I've got a number of games, EMs that I've done 10 years ago, and they still operate without issue today. But the thing is, is that like you said, it's in a home environment, so how much do they really get played? They don't get played a lot. The mileage is fairly low. So I think that has a lot to do opposed to it being operated at an establishment that's open every day with taking money from patrons. One of the things that I've had difficulty with is that we'll also get calls from somebody wanting a game repaired. If I go in and I see a stepper or something like that, it has had heavy use, is badly worn. The question is how do you get all the grit out of it? How do you get all the old lubrication out of it in order? In a lot of cases, somebody mistakenly has gone in and soaked the mechanism in WD-40, and the hopes that it would get it working well. It does get it working for a short time, and then the stuff starts coming up or getting dirty, and the mechanism fails again. I haven't figured out a good way of how to clean that and get all the grit away so that it doesn't bind up again soon. I don't know how to do that without disassembling it. On the other hand, some people who, you know, a game typically in a home will probably have a lifetime realistically of maybe a year, a year and a half, and then people will get bored with it, and let's say swap it out. It ends up sitting in the garage gathering dust and being a shelf for other stuff. That kind of game, you can get up and running by wiping it clean, and you don't need to go to extensive cleaning methods that I do in order to get something going and then satisfying that family. Then it gets past time in the next family, and you need another person to come in there and clean it one more time and get it working for another year and a half. I think my compromise is that on stepper units, I will take the moving bake light plate off and clean that, the fingers, and the stationary plate with the rivets, and then I'll also take out the rotating shaft that goes through the center of the stepper and clean that, and then the little clog levers, remove those and clean those. But I'm not going to the extent where I take all those things off, I dump them all into an ultrasonic cleaner or a bead blast them all, and then re-code them with something so that they don't rust. I'm not going to that level, but yeah, anything that's moving obviously has to be taken apart and cleaned, but I've gotten to the point where I can do a stepper unit pretty quickly unless it's actually physically rusted together. Obviously, that's going to take some more time. I think your method is actually quite appropriate. I think your method is excellent in that it gets rid of all the dirt in the moving pieces, and I don't see anything wrong with that at all. It's sort of like the difference between how people restore cars. Mine almost becomes a garage queen, and I really hope that my customers, my clients don't let it sit in their game room and don't play it. I want my stuff to be played. But on the other hand, if you, I can imagine that somebody likes to open up one of my games and look at it, I think the koonhunt that I did, a couple of koonhunts that I did, were absolutely gorgeous. If you look at the mechanism, but how many people are going to open up the door and show their guests, the visitors to their house, show them the inside of the mechanical parts. Some of them, I think, will and they'll appreciate my kind of restoration. Other people only care about how the game plays. And I think those people are appropriate as well. Those two clients require different levels of effort when cleaning a mechanism. So when you do cabinet repaints, when you're forced to go down that road, what do you do for paint nowadays? I was using lacquer, which I imagine was being originally used, but largely that stuff's unavailable. I'm kind of getting into this situation where the only thing left to use is modern style paints. Yeah, we've reached the same conclusion. In fact, in the county that I live in, you can't even get a lot of the modern style automotive paints anymore. We can only get the water-based stuff, which makes it even more difficult to find the right colors and everything else. Working out of the house, I'm at this advantage because I don't have a lot of space. I don't have a paint booth that has air filters and modern compressor and all that other stuff. Turns out recently I found the kid. He just graduated from high school. One of his projects while in high school was restoring 100 point model A. All in his own. He turned his parents garage into a paint booth, very high-tech paint booth. His air gun is $2000. The kid does absolutely amazing work. When I have to actually do a cabinet repaint, he's moved out of the county so that he can use a larger variety of materials. As a result, he's the one who does my cabinet repaint in the five years that we've been doing restorations full-time. I've only had to do two cabinets and he's done both of them. Have you ever had to restore a 37 Rockola World Series? I have worked on three of them. In fact, my restoration third in line at this point is 1937 Rockola. They're pretty amazing games. It's pretty easy to keep them running. Having to do a full restoration is probably not recommended unless it's in really poor shape. You mean because the value people want it to be original? I think a lot of it has to do with the value. I think also they're pretty reliable as long as they haven't been worn down. The three that I've worked on have all required only minor adjustments in order to keep the balls scoring correctly and keeping track of the balls and strikes and stuff like that. Another one that I just recently saw that I will probably have to figure out an answer to or at least tell the owner what the problem is. Is it only throw strikes, the little cam that sort of adds some variable direction to the picture isn't working. We've got to figure out how to make that adjustment. But most of them have been that I know has been in good condition. But I have one customer who appreciates my style of work and wants the whole game gone through it. So I'm looking forward to that. On a cabinet like that that uses like a maple or walnut veneer on the outside of you ever had to re-veneer any of those style of cabinet. I mean there's other games like the 47 basketball champ uses that style cabinet in the Evans 10 strike uses that style of cabinet. Do you ever have to do any re-veneering? Yes, I have had to do some. In the case that particularly complicated example was a pneumatic basketball. And in its life at some point it ended up sitting with one side in the next to a window and was severely bleached and dried out and the wood was cracking. And yet at the same time again trying to avoid having to re-finish the entire cabinet because probably three quarters of it at least two thirds of it was still beautiful had the original patina to it and really nice wood finished. And because of the kind of work that we do we deliberately tried to only fix the sun-leached part. And the way we did that is sanding it down some of the cracked finish actually replacing some of the veneer and then through a tedious process of trying to match the color of the original wood of the rest of the cabinet. Staining down with repeated coats and then some sanding and repeated coats getting the color to match of the wood finish. And while it's not perfect unless you're told that that's what was done and oftentimes the casual observer won't be able to see the difference. That I don't recommend that necessarily for everybody it's very time consuming very expensive to do and it does not result in a perfect finish but it kept three quarters of a game very original with the original patina. Now on pinball playfields when you have to touch them up are you using like a water-based acrylic style paint or you're using enamels or using lacquers and likewise when you clear coat on what are you using for your clear coats. Currently we're using a couple of different methods depending on how big the surface is that we need to touch up and what the quality of the bottom base wood is. The water-based acrylics really my wife I don't know how she does it but she manages to color things first putting down a base color and then maybe putting on some washes which are highly diluted alternate colors to try and bring the two color matches very close together. The problem with all of using those materials is that you're then going to have to clear coat. If I'm not going to clear coat then I will use an airbrush for larger areas to make sure that the application is smooth and consistent over the larger area. And in clear coating I still urge people to do automotive style clear coat take it to your local automotive place and when they're clear coating a car have them clear coat your play field to clear coat a play field if a customer doesn't want me to take it to an automotive place what I will do is I'll actually sand it you have to really have a strong fortitude to take sand from the outside. I'll put a paper to an antique or an old play field and sand it down with 1000 grit just to roughen up the surface make sure you get all the wax off and everything else clear coat it and I'll put some very very light coats on first sand it between coats make sure it's level and then put on a wet coat and then you're done. Is there any other interesting techniques I mean I kind of hit on the old for sonic and you're kind of a pro with the old for sonic cleaner why don't you tell me a little bit about that. Yeah the old for sonic cleaner the expertise for that comes from again from my mother she used to talk rant and rave about how she could take an entire pocket watch or a small clock and submers it and it would get rid of all the dirt and grunge. I thought wow that must be a miracle after get me one of those watch cleaning solutions are very strange stuff they're usually solvent based and what you're supposed to do is clean your clean the watch in the in the solvent based cleaner and then they've got a rinse that actually has lubricant in it and so the rinse rinse lubricate is the second phase of that so you mercy it in that material. I found that some of the cleaners that are used were a little bit too caustic for me I you know I figure if I have to be around it in the environment needs to be taken care of that it was just a little bit too hard for me and I found a nice company called alkanox which used an alkali based cleaner that's environmentally safe you know I can dump it down the drain and not have to worry about it. Also since I work out at home and I have a business license I'm very careful to use only home based cleaners or something that environmentally safe because I don't want to lose my business licenses as a result. Now what is the what's the skinny about ultrasonic cleaners and to and cleaning two dissimilar metals at the same time in the cleaner. Right one of the one of the things that you'll find if you've used it for a while as if you're cleaning a variety of parts you'll get in the electrolysis reaction between the metals some of the metals will go into solution and then get actually played it onto the other metal. Leaving the metals clean and will work just fine but you'll get a very dark stain or some you know the material with the screw or something will turn black or have a dark stain on it and while it is clean and it's going to work just fine it doesn't look clean and so for our purposes we want to avoid that. There are a couple of ways that you can deal with that one is make sure you're only using similar metals when you clean and then change the solution in between. Another is to make sure you keep your solution fairly fresh. The final way that I clean it turns out that you have a couple of problems with the really old games. One is you've got a bunch of crud on the metal parts the old lubricants that have solidified and so there is dirt and oil and all sorts of other stuff. So if you clean it in an alkali based solution you get rid of that but you don't get rid of the stains or the corrosion. And so the second batch is usually citron ox which is an acid based cleaner based on citrus fruit and that will take off any stain that you have left in the part will come out bright and shiny. There are also some modern high tech rest removers so if you've got a part that's rusty you can use some of the new, you know there's a new patented rest remover that you can actually use and you can improve it to affect it. So you can improve it to affect it by using your ultrasonic cleaner in order to apply it. Is the new rust remover like a water based thing or is it like a gel? It's more, it's not a gel, it's not like petroleum gel or what's the... It's not that stuff, the automotive part stores have this and you can look for something that's patented and it's actually pretty amazing. It doesn't take away any material at all and basically gets completely rid of the rust. Yeah I think that stuff's called a vapor rust. Yeah you can use it without your ultrasonic cleaner. All right Mike was there anything else that I've left out that you'd like to add or anything? I encourage people, part of another reason for the Sands Mechanical Museum, the website is an educational one. I try and show every once in a while I'll add something in there to show how a mechanism works, how the gate on the magic screen on a bingo or how the gates on the Pimble Machine work. I encourage people to go out there and have fun with their games not only by playing them but taking a look under the hood. I don't think it's something to be afraid of. There are a lot of resources on the internet that will teach you how to do various things, most of my cleaning process and everything else is on my website.