Hey, this is Curb, and even hot Russian chicks love to listen to Norm and Shaggy on TopCast. Hey, this is Oksana, and you're listening to TopCast with Norm and Shaggy. You're listening to TopCast, this old pinball's online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com TopCast Welcome to TopCast. Tonight we have a special episode with a guest from Australia, a pinball restorer in Australia. We're going to talk to him about the Australian pinball scene. and how it's progressed over the years and the work that he's done in restoring games for a very large collector in Australia that hopes to open a pinball museum in the near future. That is something that he wants to do much like what Tim Arnold has done with the Pinball Hall of Fame here in the United States. They hope to accomplish in even a bigger venue in Australia. Australia. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. So I'd like to introduce Lee Feldwick of Australia and we're going to give him a call on the phone right now and see how he's doing. I'll give him a call. and we'll try and get him on the line hello lee play all right how's everything with you good and you yeah really good actually before we we start i i know you you've been working uh with uh with alan tate on his massive pinball collection restoration project but before we talk about that. Let's back up a little bit. How long have you been doing pinball? When did you first get into it? Was this like a thing where you played when you were a kid? How did you get started? Well, I didn't play a great deal of pinball when I was a small child, but in teenage years where my family used to holiday on the coast, there was a town we used to stay at that had three or four different pinball parlours, and that's where it all sort of started for me. And, you know, every five and ten cent piece that I could sort of scrounge up, I used to go and either play the shooters or the pinball machines or whatever that I could put a coin into, you know. When you say shooters, you mean the gun games? Gun games, yeah. Okay, were they big in Australia? I mean, none of it was all big compared to what America had, but they were there, but the shooters, or the gun games, I'll have to call them, they were sort of down the back of the pinball parlor, because they were sort of on the 10 cents, where your pinball machines were the 20 cents, so me being the young kid, I not too often had 20 cents, so I sort of had to sacrifice and stand on a milk crate and play with the gun games sort of thing, and the mutiscapes and things like that, so that's where it all started for me, But when I was about 14, my parents, for Christmas, bought us a Lost World. And I think it was about 14 months old at the time, and I still actually owned the machine. So basically, that's where it all started, actually. So you're talking about they bought you a Bally Lost World, which is a solid-state game. Sorry? Yeah, Bally Lost World, yeah. And it's solid-state where you were, the games you were pretty much playing in the arcade were generally all electromechanicals, right? Yeah, they were. I mean, I remember when Six Million Dollar Man and things like that came out. Well, that was a new fancy thing where I'd been playing mechanicals here up until then. Okay. And so when you got this Lost World, was it working? Yeah, it was only about 14 months old, and it was right, as you know, when Lost World was made, it was just nearly space invader time, and that's what all the popularity was about. So pinball machines over here weren't sort of bringing too much money, So hence my parents were able to buy a nearly new one, which was, I think at the time they paid about $700 for it. So, you know, it was quite a cheap entertainment for a few years for us. And what part of Australia was this? This is in Sydney. It's in Sydney. Okay. So like if you were, you know, a kid in Sydney and you wanted to go out and play games, was it very hard to find an arcade or anything like that in Sydney? No, not back then. I mean, in most towns you'd probably have one or two pinball parlours. Some of them were maybe long-established ones, some were maybe temporary ones where somebody has rented a shop space for a couple of years or something like that, but you could always find a pinball or a Space Invaders or a gun game somewhere. Your soda fountains, we called the milk bars here and milk bars were quite common on corners streets and so on so there was always at least one or two pinball machines in each milk bar oh okay and what in milk bar i've never heard that term before that's great well you know what you call a soda fountain yeah it's basically milkshakes and stuff right well that's what we call a milk bar right gotcha yep and um so you got this you got this thing it's probably about 1980 because lost world i think came out in 79 so it's probably about 1980 or 81 and you had that game for a few years then what happened? No, well I've still got the machine but it sort of always stayed in my mind that pimples and jukeboxes sort of started to get very popular in my mind because I collect old American cars and everything sort of went hand in hand and it wasn't until I got married and moved up north is when I had my own house and acreage and I had room to sort of grow with the pinballs because they take up so much room, and in your parents' house you can't very well collect too many. So it wasn't basically until I got married, and that's when it went berserk. And you said you collect American cars too? Yeah, yeah, all American cars and Jeep. Anything you put a coin into, except for what we call poker machines, anything you put a coin into I collect. So you're not into, like, slot machines with spinning reels? Yeah, I'm not into them. Okay, or fruit machines as they call them in the UK. Yeah, I don't own any of them. I have no interest in them. So as far as like American cars, are you talking about 50s, 60s, 70s type thing or any era? Yep, yep, late 40s, 50s, 60s, early 70s, yeah. Okay, so yeah, the muscle car eras and prior. Yeah, or, you know, Dodge, Pontiac, Ford, Chev, anything. July Hudson, anything like that I'm into. Okay, so now you've got your own place. When you said you're in northern Australia? I live in Queensland now, the state of Queensland. So most people are in Brisbane, if you've ever heard of Brisbane. Sure. Yeah, well, I'm about 40 miles south on the coast. Okay. And so now you've got your own place and you've still got the lost world. So then what happened? Okay, then what happened, I started just checking the local paper and started looking for pinballs at garage sales and so on. And, you know, then a volley sort of poked its nose up, and then it just went from there. And all of a sudden I had 20 pinball machines, and it just kept growing and growing and growing in between that and jukeboxes and all other paraphernalia that went with it as well. So with the joys of having acreage, I finally had room to put these things and enjoy them. Now were you concentrating mostly on electromechanical or solid state or it just didn't matter? At first it didn't matter but then I weaned more to electromechanicals unless a popular solid state came up like a $6 million man or just the popular ones that everybody likes to have. But mainly electromechanicals then I also like wood rails as well only for the artwork and I know they're not the most popular thing to play, but I think they're fantastic to look at. Yeah, actually, I've been going through my wood rails a lot right now. When you were visiting here, you kind of saw I was just getting started on that. I've done about eight of them in the last few months. And, I mean, if you do the right things to them, man, you can get them to play great. You can. Yeah, people are just used to playing worn-out, trashed ones. They're used to playing a lazy wood rail, which would turn anybody off. Right. But as you said, if you get one, you know, you replace your flipper coils, and you get it really hum and nice, they're quite good to play. And a lot of people disagree with me, but I think some of them are quite hard to play because they're a real challenge. Oh, yeah, yeah, they're definitely, there's some that are quite difficult. There's some that are easy, but there are some that are just really hard. Like I got this. It's a challenge. Yeah, I got this. You can always write a good pinball when it's a good challenge. Right. I got this one, Green Pastures by Gottlieb. Yeah. And it's just, it's really hard to get any sort of a replay out of it. But then you play something else, you know, and some of them, you know, you feel like you're raping the machine. That's right. You know, it just depends on the game, you know. It does. It does. Well, so, okay, so now what year was it when you bought the property up north in Queensland? I've been here 15 years. So what's that like, that, sorry, 1992? Okay, and then, so you started, you got about 20 games in your collection, but you're starting to gravitate more towards electromechanicals, 50s, 60s, 70s. You know, so then what happened? I mean, you know. Well, basically what happened then, the collection grew up to around 40 or 50, where it probably sits about now. but I think it was probably about eight years ago now, my wife and I did another trip to America, which we used to go to America for all the car shows and things like that, but this time we had an opportunity to go. There was the Chicagoland show on and there was the Pinball Wizards Convention on roughly around the same time, so we did a big five-week trip and we did as many shows as we possibly could and we got to the Pinball Wizards Convention and just thoroughly enjoyed it. So it sort of got more intense then, and hence that's where a lot more things were available to me, parts-wise and so on like that. And so when I come back from the States, it sort of just took another leap forward. Now, in Australia, how hard was it, like, you know, in the 90s to present, How hard was it to find machines in the buy and sell papers, in the classifieds, or wherever? All right. Easy question. In the early 90s when I first moved up to this property I'm at now, machines, you used to probably pick one up out of the local paper probably one every couple of weeks. Really? People had them in garages. Kids have finished playing with them and moved out and so on. It was not easy, but it was good going. You were picking up for the right sort of a price. But in the last four or five years now, you're lucky to ever see a pinball machine in a paper, in your local paper. They always have dealers in a trading post paper, but to get one locally at a garage sale or an antique shop or something like that, it very rarely happens now. And how were the prices back then compared to now? probably half the price it's to pay now. And more to the point is that, see, the other difference with the pinballs over here compared to in your country is that, see, Australia, a lot of our machines were on site a terrible lot longer because the operators were just trying to strangle as much money out of them as they could. So hence the machines got more play and they're more worn out. So that's the other thing. where trying to find ones in very good condition is quite hard. Hmm, okay. Where I know you guys do get a bit more of a selection of better quality machines where we've got to get fairly well-worn machines over here. So when you went to the Allentown show, I mean, was that... Is there no kind of similar show in Australia? There is no show in Australia. Nothing? Nothing. Oh, wow. Well, you guys need to correct that. That's for sure. Yeah, no, they never have. I mean, there's been the occasional auction, but that's nothing. That just gets people in a room for three or four hours and that's it. But no, there's no show. Never has been. I don't know if there ever will be, because the problem we've got here is that there's not too many pinball collectors in Australia as a whole. Like, in your country you've got lots of people in each sort of state and town that get together and so on Here, you can drive hundreds of miles before you'll find another pinball collector You know, it's just not the popularity as you guys have got it over there So to have a show and expect a lot of people to turn up to it, it just sort of won't happen What about as far as retail shops, places selling parts and selling games? Very rare. Pardon me? Very rare. Really? Yeah. I mean, is this like the thing you're saying in Australia you could count, there's less than 10 for the whole country type thing? 10 parts supplies, that would be about it. When I say major, I'm not talking about pinball resource size or anything like that. I'm just talking about maybe a big operator that sells parts, probably one of them in each state of Australia, and let's face it, there's only seven states. So there's not a lot of people doing it. So it was interesting in a recent pin game journal, or maybe it was Game Room, I can't remember. I think it was the journal. There was a guy actually advertising for a technician in Australia, a pinball technician. Correct. Maybe Pindell or something like that, I can't remember Yeah, it was Del James Rees at Bumper Action Right, right And, I mean, is that kind of unusual to see somebody Or, I mean, are techs well needed there? Well, I'll sum that up real quick for you What is unusual in this country is a pinball technician Of any type There ain't any of them out there Okay So he had no choice but to advertise like this, really, if he needed somebody He's got no choice, and I'd be very surprised if he actually found anybody. Really? Okay. Huh, well, there you go. And I think that's probably why he's advertised in the Ping Game Journal or Game Room, wherever you saw it. That's probably why he's had to go worldwide to find somebody to fix pinball machines, because there's nobody down here to train anybody, for a start, and there's nobody down here that does it. And now how did you get associated with Alan Tate in his collection, and how did that whole thing start? Because you were kind of on the ground floor helping him acquire, he's got like 1,000 games now, right? Yeah, plus. Plus, more than that, huh? Oh, yeah, yeah. I wasn't in, well, where it all started with me and Alan, I just got a phone call one day from Alan, who was talking to a mutual friend of each other. Obviously it was a customer of his and a friend of mine and he just happened to mention that he knew somebody that had pinballs and Alan acquired my phone number off him and he just rang me one day and said, oh, you know, I have a large collection. We must get together sometime and have a talk. But Alan's a very private, quiet sort of a person and I sort of never heard from him. I said, yes, you're more than welcome to come over for a coffee or a beer, whatever you like, but I never heard from Alan again for about six months and then I knew where his company was. So I went and approached him and ever since then we became quite good friends and then it wasn until a couple of years ago he asked me to come and work for him and restore his games Now how long has he been acquiring machines I think he been going for about seven or eight years. And does he get most of them from Australia? I was never involved in actually buying any of the machines for him that was all done before I knew him. Okay and did he get most of the stuff from Australia? No most of the stuff from your country. Really so he would come over here and fill a container type thing. Yep, absolutely. Okay. Okay, and I mean, when you get these games back, isn't Australia on like 220 volts or 240? Yeah, we're on 240 volts here, 50 hertz. Yeah, so that is going to be a bit of a challenge. What we do in the meantime, I have several transformers here that just steps down the voltage from 240 down to 110. So that's the easy way around that at the moment. So instead of putting, like, you know, for EMs, most of them aren't, the transformers don't have multi-taps. They're just, you know, 110 or whatever. So, excuse me, are you going to have to replace the transformers, or are you just going to set up, like, a 110 or 120-volt power grid for all this stuff to plug into? What we're thinking of doing is setting up exactly that power grid. I mean, to say three or four rooms or something like that, we'll have it just running on straight 110, which will cut out a terrible lot of hassle. We'll have to change transformers and all this sort of carry-on. So we just might run it at 110. That's a good idea. So now you're working for Alan basically full-time restoring his games, right? Yep, six days a week. Six days a week. and I mean, how many games can you do in a month? Well, that can vary because depending on the condition of the machines. I've done a terrible lot of... Alan bought a lot of these late import, what I call import games from Europe and so on. I think that everybody else in the world is at a crack at. I was turning over a Dot Matrix game probably. I was doing a full rebuild on one end of them probably two to three days depending on the condition of them. where the wood rails now, they sort of take a bit more time, you know, depending on conditions. See, I redo all the timber work and all the legs and, you know, you know what it's like, Joshua Clay, going through the backbox and every contact and down in the cabinet. And, you know, there's a fair bit of time, sometimes three days, sometimes four, just depending on condition. Now, on the 90s stuff, typically what do you do to one of those games to bring it back? Well, me being not a technician, and I'm the first person to admit it, these games that came from Europe, I don't know if you've found this in your country, but they're all, I don't think they've ever been serviced since the day they were plugged in. Right. They were putrid. A terrible lot of bodgy repairs were done on them. Yeah, hacks as we call them. Hacks. Sorry? We call them hacks. Yeah, hacks. You know where they use? A terrible lot of cigarette paper, and I don't know what it is. They used to use paper toweling to fill terrible ramps and so on. So, you know, that was the problem with those 90s games. They were rough. That's why the Europeans got rid of them, I think, because they'd sort of made their money and the machines were finished, you know. Right, right. So are you buying, like, from Pinball Incorporated in Georgia, or are you just buying ramps and plastics and whatever else you can do, or are you trying to make your own? I have done. Yeah, the ones that needed, like, the ramps were absolutely destroyed. Yeah, I've had to replace the ramps and so on. Sometimes you can get away with repairing them without them looking bad. I mean, you can't use superglue or anything because that just turns them frosty white that everybody knows. So if I can get away with repairing them properly, I'll do that. Otherwise, we do replace them. But mind you, there was only 40 of those machines, and they're all done and finished and covered up now. So not too many more of them, hopefully. So now Alan's collection spans from 50s up to 90s, right? Not in 40s and up. 40s and up. Is there anything that he specializes in or that he likes in particular? Alan's a wood rail person Okay So now you've started working on his wood rails right? Yep And you refinish the wood rails And the legs? Yes What about the cabinet paint? What I'm doing at the moment I'm actually picking the best ones out Before I go into See once I start doing cabinet repaints And so on that's going to Slow me up And if we ever get this museum, the property and all that sorted out. I want as many machines to go in there to start as possible. So I try to pick the good ones out now rather than the basket case ones because they're going to hold me time up, that's all. I mean, I've done cabinet repaints for myself, but I haven't done any for Alan's yet. And is that his hope to actually open a Pinball Hall of Fame style museum? Yep, absolutely. And does he have the property acquired? Alan does have property. Where we work at the moment, the property was purchased for that reason, but it's turned out that it's not the right... industrial has moved in in the last five or six years and it's turned out to be the wrong location and the wrong land. So Alan at the moment is trying to source another property that's... there's a lot of things you've got to consider when you're trying to build a pinball museum because, let's face it, it doesn't appeal to everybody in the community. So you've got to be reasonably close to major amenities so people will actually come and visit. You know, because you'll always get pinball people will travel to a pinball show or a museum. But you also do need to generate the general public as well, you know, to make it all worthwhile. Otherwise you'd probably have one or two people walk through the door in a day. day. How many, I'm sorry, how many machines do you think, you know, he's, you know, I mean, how big of a building is he looking, how many machines is he looking to have in the museum? Well, Joshua Clay, every day the building seems to get bigger in our minds. It's, we don't know. It's got to be a very large building because Alan just doesn't want to fill it full of pinball machines. It's got to be full of, you know, there's got to be a section with small kiddies rides and there's got to be somewhere to eat. There's got to be... He wants to put a 50s diner in there. They want to be a room full of shooting games, gun games, mutoscopes, all sorts of weird and wonderful things, you know. So it's got to be large, and Alan also wants to do it as a theme rather than just one big, enormous square factory or something like that with all machines up and down. He wants to actually build rooms and little hidey holes and dim lights for the wood rails. He wants to build real character for the whole building. Yeah, have you been to Las Vegas and seen the Pinball Hall of Fame? No, I've been to Tim's place on several occasions, but I haven't been over since the Hall of Fame. I've been in America, but I haven't had a chance just to pop over to Vegas on the way home. Yeah, he doesn't... I know what you're trying to achieve, and it's a much bigger and cooler picture. Tim is just kind of like, I got a room, I think he's got 5,000 square feet, and he just filled it with 200 pinball machines. But he doesn't have the personality thing going like what you're talking about. I think he wanted it to play, didn't he? Pardon me? I think he did want the personality. I think it was more the point, I've got to sort of get in and now and do it or never do it sort of thing. Right, and I think that's exactly what it is. the other problem too is that Tim's motto is it's about the game stupid that's what he keeps telling it himself so he really wants to concentrate on keeping the games running um you know top notch and everything working great and you know between him and his uh his buddy that works their hippie those guys don't have a second to breathe 200 not yeah 200 machines totally understand it yeah 200 machines and keeping them all running, it's a full-time job for just two guys. That is a huge job. Yeah. So, you know, it's a huge undertaking, and what Alan is doing, he's going to have to hire a lot more help. That's for sure. And the one thing that Alan does specify, he doesn't want to do this to make money. He said, the minute that I've got to make money on this, as in if this museum has got to turn over admission fees and all that, he said, I'll walk away. He said he wants to do it for enjoyment, so people go there for enjoyment and that's it. But he said the minute I've got to make money on it, he said I'll close the doors. Yeah, that's... Because otherwise the fun goes out of it for him. Yeah, that's kind of Tim's angle too because he's, you know, he's given everything away to charity and as long as he makes the nut every month, you know, pays the rent, pays the electricity, you know, that's all he's really looking to do too. That's all Alan wants to do, just enough to pay for the electricity and for the few people and people come in and wipe the games over. He's just enough to keep everything rolling over. He said he's got his other business that makes him money. He said, I don't need this to have to make money. Right, right. Well, that's pretty cool. Is there any kind of timeline where you guys think you might actually be open? Not at the moment. I mean, even this week we were out looking at property, but at this stage Alan looks like he's going to actually build this building. we're not going to be going into like a factory and renting something Alan wants to buy property, a large property and he wants to build on it at the moment but it's just trying to find the right property and real estate's going through the roof down here at the moment because Alan just wants acreage so people can come and have a picnic as well he wants the whole family environment involved not just to come and look at pinballs for an hour and go so it's very hard trying to find the right location and the right spot but he's on it all the time. Wow. And so now of the wood rails that you're doing, any interesting titles? Well, today I just finished a, what did I finish? Barnacle Bill today. Okay, which is like 1947 or 48. Gottlieb. Yeah. With six flippers, basically the same playfield layout as Humpty Dumpty but different art. Basically, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they did that run from like 47 for like six games. Essentially the games were all copies of Humpty Dumpty. Yeah, Leigh Barber, things like that, yeah. Yeah. Any other interesting ones? Well, just before I knocked off today, I pulled out a Flying High. Okay, 52, I think. I've only got the head box. I don't know what the cabinet's like. The head box is in nice condition. Back glass is very nice. I don't know what the bottom half's going to be like. I know the game has been near water because I found corrosion in the backbox, so I'm a bit worried what the bottom half is going to be like, but anyway, we'll get through that. Right. I've done a lot of United as well. I tend to like the artwork there, which most people probably wouldn't, but I've done Monterey, Bermuda, Ramona, just those early ones. I think the artist, for United was Roy Parker, I believe. Because he was under contract with many of the pinball companies and I believe that he did at least some of the United games also. So that's probably why you're liking the artwork. I'd say so, yeah. It's very stylish. Roy Parker stuff, it's pretty easy to point them out. You can always look at the hands of the people. You only have to look at the girls' hands and if they're not real good hands you'll know they're Roy's. Right, or they're hidden because he always likes to hide the hands because he had a problem drawing hands and he would, if he had a choice between not drawing a hand and kind of having it behind her coat or her dress or something, he would try and do that. That's correct, yeah. Yeah. So, and so what, have you done any of the gun games for Alan? I haven't done the gun games yet because most of them will need cabinet repaints and my workshop is just getting so full and I want a spray booth before I start doing cabinets like that. So we haven't got to the stage of got a spray booth yet. So it's just to see where my workshop is, Alan's business is a lumber yard and I've got sawdust and everything floating everywhere. Now I'm in a sealed room, but if I put a back glass down for half a day, I can still wipe my finger through it and find dust all through it. So I ain't going to start painting cabinets without a booth. Okay, we'll be right back with Lee Feldwick of Australia and talk to him more about pinball restoration and the pinball hobby in Australia. Pins and Vids Episode 2, Attack of the Phones, is now available at pinsandvids.com. It's the best Pins and Vids yet. Double the fun and half the underwear in the first episode. Surely to be nominated for an Oscar for the best use of fake phones in a niche video or best special effects during a dream sequence. Worth much, much more than the $6 including shipping and selling price, it's worth at least $7 or $7.50. Get your copy now at pinsandvids.com. And now for a word from our lawyer. The entire sale price goes to the Pinball Hall of Fame. First episode also available. Some pinball machines were hurt during the filming of the Pins and Vids, but they were old. Get your Duranian DVDs on CoinUpGoodness now. Okay, we're back with Lee Felwick of Australia telling us about his pinball restoration work that he's doing in Australia. Do you find it hard to stay focused on any one particular game? You know, that's like a problem I have where I start a game and then something else comes in or I get distracted and then sometimes it'll, you know, something I thought I'd have done in a week ends up taking two months. No, I'm probably in a little bit different position there where this is my sort of job, I've got to do it. And lucky for me, I'm a finishing person. I've got to have something finished, otherwise I can't sit comfortable with anything. So I'll start a game, I'll finish it right to the end, and then I'm happy. I won't start another game. Unless I'm waiting on parts, I won't start another one. So are you like, you know, just sending boatloads of money over to Pinball Resource every month? No, we bought a fair bit one trip. and I've just been going off, I bought it like a lot and I've just been going through it that way. I'm not doing too much with the bumper caps and so on at the moment because I'd rather wait until the machines are just about to go on display before I start spending money on putting bumper caps on them. Right. And I'm also hoping that we can possibly try and get bumper caps that are a cream color, not Zac Stark white. Right. Yeah, I think Steve's working on that issue where the original plastics were plunger injection molded, you know, hand plungered, and they have this kind of marbleized look to them originally. That's correct. Yeah, the new stuff is all automatic injection molded, and the plastic is very consistent in color, which is, from a production standpoint, you know, that's more ideal, but from a... Authenticity, it's not. Right, exactly. I was talking to Donald Murphy just at the Pinball Expo in November about it, and we were trying to explain to him that this Zac Stark white, me personally, if you do up a beautiful machine that maybe has age, then all of a sudden you put on these pure white bumper bodies and bumper caps, I mean it sticks out like a sore thumb. Right. Yeah, I have the same issue. That's why I've been kind of the same thing. Unless the cap is totally wasted I not buying a new one That correct But on the other hand too I all for people going to the effort of making reproduction parts for this hobby So I take my hat off to anybody to do anything. We need so many reproduction parts. So to even be lucky enough to have bumper bodies and bumper caps to choose from, whether you like them or not, it's still a huge thing, and I think I'd take my hat off to them. but I just hope we can sort of get the colours right, that's all. Right. Now, what about the pin rescue business? How did that get started? Actually, that got started, we'll go back to the Pinball Wizards Convention when my wife and I were over there. Mark Nienkiewicz was doing a seminar there on reproduction plastics to do them, you know, how it was done and so on. and at the time I had some pictures of my rocket ship that I'd taken over because I was quite proud. Because to have a wood rail in Australia, besides Alan, but to have a wood rail in Australia is quite rare. And as I found out to have a rocket ship when I was showing people in America, it was really nothing to be proud of. But anyway, I had done a set of plastics on the rocket ship and I was showing these photos around and Mark Minkowitz happened to say to me, geez your plastics look good I said I've reproduced them and Mark said to me look I do a couple of sets a year he said but something that this pinball hobby needs in this world is reproduction plastics he said if you can do anything he said it would be great so I've come home discussed it with Gordon the chap that did the plastics and it sort of went from there we did a couple of trial runs and we do it properly not um photocopies and all that i mean you've seen them play so you know that they're the royal mccoy but that's that's where it all started at the pinball wizards convention yeah i have i've bought a number of your sets when you when you had them available um and they're they're they're perfect i mean they're the colors are right the the style is right and they're in their Marc Silk screen right they're done exactly the same way as they would have been done in the 40s and 50s right down to the stamping machine to cut them out of the plastic we even went and bought an old early 50s heidelberg machine to actually stamp them out because uh we went through a terrible lot of processes to cut the plastics out of the sheet of plastic um right down to the uh die cutting and all that but you never get the same finish they burn and and they burr them, and no, just a terrible laser cutting doesn't work properly, and I have the opinion if you're going to do something, do it right or don't start it. Now, I mean, when you say laser cutting, it just doesn't give the same look or something? No, it doesn't. We tried with the laser cutting, and what it does, it leaves an edge around the side of your plastic where you can see it's actually been laser cut. Unless, and there are people out there that have since done plastics and had them laser cut, and then they'll sit and buff them. But the problem is once you hit them with a buff, that means heat, and that's when you sort of lose your accuracy of your straight line. Right, right. Mind you, in saying that, we were lucky enough to have an old Heidelberg stamp. And it's an actual printing machine, and we used to have the knives made, and they used to guillotine them out. that's why our finishes were like that and I believe that's how they were similarly done back in the 40s and the 50s now were you doing back glasses too? yeah we did touch on back glasses we weren't screen printing them we were using high end digital printing okay and how did that work? well it turned out to be quite successful but the problem that we found is trying to find a dustless environment is very hard and what we were finding was the acrylic that we were using for the back glasses, acrylic gives off a gas 24-7 and it can produce very, very, very small air bubbles. It's like when you've got a plastic cup sitting on your bench. It's giving out toxins and gases all the time. it's just that when you're trying to capture them underneath a piece of vinyl, eventually you will get a very small air bubble so I don't like selling anything that I wouldn't be proud of owning so we actually pulled the back glasses we only found it happening in a very couple back glasses but you know you don't want that going to customers so we pulled out of the back glasses Now you're not doing plastics and basically Pinball Rescue is closed. No, I closed it down three and a half years ago. Right. Now, can you talk about what happened there? Yeah, basically, there was a lot of stories going around. I'll set the story straight. It's a multitude of things that ended up finishing it up. We were going for three and a half years. Both Gordon and I had day jobs, very busy day jobs, and this started out to be a hobby thing. It got to the stage where I was working 17, 18-hour days, seven days a week between my job and Pinball Rescue was overtaking everything. I was getting probably 30 emails a day. I used to come home from my day job at 5 o'clock, throw some dinner down, race down half an hour to the factory, produce plastics, come back at 11 o'clock, then do 30 emails, pack up orders and all that and finally get into bed at one or two o'clock in the morning. And the problem is, for three and a half years, that sort of takes its toll. It was the sort of business where it would have supported my wife and I very well, but not for Gordon to give up his job as well. So that was one of the problems. We either had to go bigger or close down. But at the same time, a lot of other... I wouldn't say a lot, a few other people were deciding that they'd have a go at doing plastics as well. which I commend the people to do it but we were finding people were doing the same plastics that we had done or in the middle of doing which we thought that was a bit pointless. We thought, you know, let's everybody get together and, you know, do all different ones. And then we had one of the bigger collectors in America write to us to say that he was going to produce every set of Williams and Gottlieb's plastics from 1956 up to about 1960. 1965 and we thought well that's just if you're going to do that what's the point of us keep going there so that's why we pulled the pin on it well you should have kept going because that guy that you were talking about it didn't materialize well it did for about three months yeah he did like three sets I mean you know where I'm coming from but yeah It got to the stage where we also had people buying quantities of our plastics and then selling them under their own name and things like that. So, yeah, it's just sort of all come to the end. But when we got that email to say that particular person was going to do that, American people are very patriotic, and I commend them for that. And if a product is available in America, you wouldn't go to the other side of the world to buy the same product. I don't know. I've seen your product. I'd go to the other side. Yeah, but the problem is the person that buys the one-off sets, they don't realize that. Right. You know, so... Come on, I mean, I need Gottlieb Hawaiian Beauty Plastics. Yeah, a lot of people did. Yeah, Mark Nemowitz did them, but he's, you know, I think he got into the same situation that you found, where, you know, it just consumes a lot of time. It's a lot of time. Yeah, and he won't even answer my emails. I mean, I think he's totally disconnected from the whole thing now and doesn't want anything to do with it. Yeah, Mark has a very busy job that he works in. I know he's all over the place. But, yeah, I think Mark, we used to work in conjunction with Mark. A very good friend of mine is Mark, and we sort of used to ring occasionally and joke and carry on and sort of swap technical ideas and all that. But, see, Mark did his in his home garage, and he did a beautiful job for that environment. I mean, we were lucky enough, we had a screen printing business. I mean, Gordon, my ex-partner, that's what he had, it was a business. So we used to use his facilities at night. For Mark to produce the quality products that he did in his garage, I'd take my hat off to him, they were fantastic. But it's a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money to set up for a run of plastics. It's not a few hundred dollars, I can tell you that. Right, right. Yeah, it's big money. By plastics. And if people are asking why does everybody need plastics for wood rails, it's because the butane, I believe, was the original material that they used, the original plastic. Yeah, it's turned into bacon. Yeah, little pieces of brown crumpled bacon is really a good way to describe it. And I can tell you the easiest way to find out if you're just about to lose your set of plastics it will happen over a matter of a month when any one set of plastics will decide to go you'll find they'll get very tacky and sticky underneath and once that happens you've got about three weeks until they turn into goo and see the problem is whether we're talking about pinball plastics or a part of a vacuum cleaner or anything like that plastic now from the 40s and the 50s is starting to go back into its original life. Right, its original materials that it was made from. Yeah, it's starting to, they're breaking down. Right, exactly. I mean, the material that we use was the same as what your Coca-Cola bottles is made out of. That's why you can bend our plastics in half and it'll go back to its original form. Right, you're using PETG, you know, so. Yeah. Yeah, exactly, yeah. That's a good product. It's the dearest product, but it's the most versatile. Some plastics don't like screen printing inks and so on. We went for that because it was the most hardy material we could find and the best. Right. It's almost to the point where I'm going to have to start screening my own plastics for some of my games because, like, the Hawaiian beauties, I mean, it's, you know, like you said, they've turned into bacon and they're about ready to implode, you know, and just be nothing but a pile of goo. Yeah, and then all of a sudden you've got, without the plastics, your artwork, the machine just doesn't look anything, does it, you know? Yeah, it's awful. I mean, it's bad. I mean, there's guys doing reproduction glasses now, computer generated, but for some reason they don't seem to be doing plastics for whatever reason. It's a different technique. See, because a lot of people worry about the shapes and cutting them out. That's a lot of a hassle. Your registration and your artwork has got to be so absolutely critical on your plastics. Back glasses, you can get away with it a little bit. Plastics, you can't. Right, because it's a smaller item. Yeah, and not only that, most of the artwork's got the black border around it. You go outside that. Right. And there are plastics out there that people have done, and you see what happens when it doesn't go right. And then all of a sudden you think, geez, I think I'd rather have the old plastics than those. And is there any chance that you would be doing this again, or is this just... Here it comes. I was waiting for that one. Yeah, this is all past history. Probably not. Probably not. Look, I'd love to because I had so much enjoyment doing it. I met so many wonderful people, had wonderful experiences and I just enjoy helping people and especially, I mean, I used to get emails back from people that are just over the moon. They've now got this parts machine in their garage that all of a sudden they've got plastics, they've bought some other stuff from Steve Young and now they've got an up and running pinball and there's another one restored. So I got a great kick out of it. But I just don't think I could ever go back to it again, unfortunately. I used to enjoy it, but it was a lot of work. Yeah, I bought most of your plastics just based on speculation. Like, you know, I've got, you sold, like, Buckaroo, for example. Well, my Buckaroo plastics are fine. But, you know, I figure it's just a matter of time before they, you know, implode. Yeah, when we first started Pinball Rescue, I mean, we were naive, and I'm the first to admit it. we thought Slick Chick, Buckaroo, Sweethearts, Magic City, things like that were going to be the ones that people wanted. But we were basing that on the machines that our plastics needed, our machines needed plastics, so not the world. But we had to start somewhere, and we didn't have the... We used to have a request page on our website that people used to request a plastic, and then every time we used to get more than 10 requests for any one plastic, we set it into production. but that was the other thing that killed us as well. We used to quite openly have this site where everybody could see what plastics had been requested and how many people had requested. And unfortunately, a couple of people did copy and paste that whole website and then used it for themselves and then got all of our information and started going into opposition. So that's what you get for being honest, but hence you get that. but there's a lot of plastics out there that people need and needed. I mean, we were just about to go in. Egghead was another one that was quite popular. We've done the artwork. There was quite a lot of plastics ready to rock and roll, but hence, they're just not going to happen. Fathom was the last set we did. Oh, really? And that would have been enough to turn anybody off doing plastics, doing Fathom, so... Yeah, was that a four-color process plastic? How many? You said Fathom, right? Is that what you said? Yeah, barely Fathom. We normally didn't do late games, but there was such a high demand in Fathom. We got actually 28 requests, and I said to Gordon, I think we'd better do Fathom. It's such a huge set, lots of knives and big plastics. So we decided to go into production with Fathom, and then we used to do a newsletter once a month. I used to sit and write one with tips and what was coming up, a bit of a joke here and there. And I put a note there of the production update on Fathom to say that we're halfway through. And then all of a sudden, within about three weeks, I got another 40 requests. So we had to stop production, quit another 50 sets and get them up to where we were at and then continue off. And I had, I think, 85 sets of Fathom and I pre-sold every set. But isn't Fathom... It was a big set, but there was another thing. See, Fathom, I borrowed a set of plastics from America, and then there was a couple there that weren't quite right, so I had to borrow another set from somebody else in America, and they were two different colors. So Fathom must have been done in a couple of different runs because the blues were different. But isn't Fathom a four-color process, as opposed to, like, you know, the old school is like, you know, you might have eight different colors and you've got a screen for each color. If you want to talk about which was the worst one, it was hay burners. Okay. Next time you have a look at a hay burner, have a look at how many different color horses' heads are on the plastic. Oh, you mean it was like 12 colors? Oh, I think it was nine or something like that. It was a big job. But Fathom, well, you've got, I've forgotten how many. I think there might have been six colors, I think. Okay. I could be wrong. There's the yellow. There's two different blues in it. There a light blue and a dark blue yellow black white is about five or six colors Right at some point Bally converted to this four process where they used just four colors and then they used a little dot technology to get every color. Yeah, we didn't do that. Okay. I didn't know if Fathom had done that or not. No, they didn't, no. Okay. No. They started doing that on some of the back glasses, and I think those are a challenge to reproduce. Oh, well, but if you go back to your original straight flush back glass and really have a look at that background in that, that's a hard one to produce as well. That's got a pattern behind it. It's got a what behind it? Next time you have a look at your straight flush, really look into the black glass and you'll see there's a pattern behind it. Really? Mm. Okay. And also on plastics as well that some people, the punters, and get a bit confused. Williams decided to print on top of the plastic. You mean opposed to going underneath and seeing like a negative through? The whole process is turned upside down. So we did gusher. Oh, boy, you really had to have your wits about you. I'll tell you what, you couldn't do your plastics after a couple of beers and a Vegemite sandwich, that's for sure. You had to be 100% on the ball because you put your wrong colours down. See, normally your black was your first color down. With Williams Plastics, your black's your last. Right. So it made it for less error because, you know, your black is your last one. So everything's got to be perfect before your black goes on. So if you've got registration problems at the start, you might as well throw them out because you're going to have problems all the way through. And just to explain to people, when you're Marc Silk screening, you've basically got to make a screen for every color. and they've got to line up perfect and the order in which you do the colors is extremely important too. In most cases, you can get away with it. You can get away with some of the earlier machines. You can get away with it like if the colors don't overlap or they're in just complete isolated colors. You don't have to do it exact in order but if they're close or something like that, Yes, it's best to do them all in order. Right. If your registration has to be perfect, though... It's got to be absolutely perfect. I mean, I use every plastic that may. I used to sit here under a big... I've got a billiard table fluorescent light. I used to hold every one up to make sure everything was perfect, and otherwise I'd go into the dirt bin. Because I didn't know if people were going to hold them up to a fluorescent light like me, but it just gets back to the original thing. If I wasn't happy with something, I don't expect anybody else to be happy with it. We probably got more seconds and all that than first qualities. You should pile those all up and send them to me. I'll take seconds over nothing. You know what I mean? Easily. I still have them, and I wouldn't be able to lift the box. Oh, really? Yeah. I would have thousands and thousands of them, but most of them you probably couldn't tell the problem with them, but I can. Yeah, you know, at this point, for some games, I mean, you know, you're lucky to find anything. And believe me, the little crusty pieces of bacon, your seconds are going to be, you know, miles and miles and miles ahead. Oh, yeah, a lot of people have said that now, but back then when I was selling, you know, when you're asking, you know, $45 and $50 for a set, you want them to be first quality for your customers. So I wouldn't dare let a set of seconds go. But now that the others are all gone, I mean, if I had, like, you know, 53 Grand Slam or Queen of Diamonds, if I had another 50 sets to them, I think I could sell them in a week. Right. They used to just race out the door. We didn't realize. But, see, Queen of Diamonds was a problem child because the size of the plastic. Right. Our old Heidelberg machine wasn't big enough to do it. So how did you cut those? We had to outsource somebody that had a very large machine. Oh. And there's more expense again. Right. It makes things more complicated. Yeah. Right. And then you always have problems. Like we had a problem where we had a bad lot of ink once. The white ink went off, you know, and therefore you have to send out replacement sets to everybody because you know in time that the ink's going to go off. So, yeah, it's just an expensive process. What do you mean? What would happen to the white ink? It would craze. Now, which one was it? I think it was the Queen of Diamonds we had to do two sets and I sent out a replacement set to everybody. We sold, I think, about 32 sets and then I noticed the set that I had here in my office that I used to hang up every time we'd do a set. I noticed there was a slight bit of crazing come through so we just immediately went into production and re-ran them and I just put them all back in the post-packs and send them to everybody that I send the original set to, free of charge, because just in case. Wow. And did you save the screens for all this artwork? No. No, the screens are quite expensive. We have to reuse the screens, because otherwise you would have hundreds of screens just lying around. We're not the little handheld ones. We use the big ones on the machine. Right. You know, and they're $200 each to buy. so you can't afford to have them lined around and that's the beauty with Marc Silk screens we've still got all the images so you just burn your screens again right so it's not that big of a deal it's not that big of a deal if I ever bribed you into doing this again you could conceivably do it did I give out all that information I shouldn't have then yes you're right a mistake you made the main thing when you do anything with screen printing if you keep your black images you can always burn a screen. Right. Now, how do you do that? I mean, you've got them on the computer, right? The black images? I'll quickly go through the process. Would you like me to do that? Yeah. Okay, what do you do? First of all, you acquire a set of plastics. What we used to do is try and acquire a good set of plastics. You scan them. And then we used to blow them up 30% and restore the artwork. this is where the time comes into it because now are you restoring it in Illustrator or Photoshop? Photoshop Photoshop, okay okay, Adobe so you blow it up 30% 30 times you blow it up and then you sit for 20-30 hours and you're basically redrawing the image because when you go to send your images off, when you do all your colour separations, if the artwork's not perfect, the computer will pick it up and then put in either a hole or a blotch there where something should be a colour. But anyway, I'm getting ahead of it. I don't want to confuse anybody. So as soon as you scan your plastics, you then get each... Let's say we're going to do a kick-out plastic of, oh, let's say Buckaroo. Okay, there's a picture on it with the cowboy with his butt showing, you know, and his jeans. So you explode that up 30 times and you basically redraw and restore the artwork. Okay, and once everything's fine and you're happy with everything, then, and you do that for every plastic in that set, then you do your colour separation. So what you do, let's say Buckaroo had six colors in it. So for everything that's blue, you click on it, and then you do a blue image. Then your red, sorry, there's no red, your orange, your black, your skin color, whatever color, you've got to do a separate color image. So what you end up is all these little funny pictures with just blotches everywhere because it's just like a shirt sleeve or a pocket or something like that. So you end up with an image for each color? An image for each color. And the easiest one to do is the white because that's the one that covers the whole back of the plastic. Right. Okay. So once you've got that and you've got that on your little floppy or whatever you do on your computer, however you do it, you then take it to an image setting company and you get what you... It's like a very thin piece of plastic. It's like floppy, like cellophane. basically what it is, a thick cellophane and they put each one of those images like you'll have a sheet for blue, a sheet for black a sheet for white, skin, colour, red, green, whatever colour they'll give you a separate sheet for every colour OK? OK So then once you've got your images that's when you start burning your screens So we used a big screen and we were able to put like three different colours on one screen. That's only because we had industrial machines to do it with. But anyway, just for the argument of discussion here, so you then get one of the images. Let's say we're going to do the black, which is your first colour normally unless it's a Williams. You burn that onto a screen and a screen is just like a very thin, like fly screen on your windows but with much smaller holes and you apply a brown solution over it, which is a burning solution. It's basically PVA glue but with more chemicals in it. That's burned for 12 minutes. And once you take it out of the burner and then all of a sudden there's your screen ready to screen print. But the first thing you must do is always check that there's no impurities or a little bit of gum or anything like that that's got in the way. You always make sure your image is perfect. And then you set to print. So you put it on your screen printing bench and you mix your colour and make sure you use the right colour. We always used to get the correct colour from underneath a screw or something like that so it was the original colour, not the faded, washed colour. And that's when you start screen printing one colour. Normally your black's first, then whatever colour, you know, your blue, your red or your yellow. And your last colour's always the white block out at the back, is always your last colour. Yeah, the light diffuser. That's it, and you've got to get that a right consistency. If you have that too thick, your light doesn't shine through it. If you have it too thin, it just goes to a blur, and your light globes show through it as a spotlight. Right. So that's got to be right. So once your plastics are screen printed and done, and they're all done on an A4 piece of plastic, let them dry for about three or four days, and that's when we used to get knives made for the Heidelberg machine. and that's when we stamped them out. Once they're stamped out, they never did the screw holes. I always used to do them manually on a big drill press. I used to just mark it as a black dot where the holes had to be. And then after that, I used to sit and just check every plastic to make sure that the registration was absolutely perfect, no colour outside of anything. Pack it and away you go. So you never did any of the artwork in Illustrator then? You were always using Adobe Photoshop. Adobe, yeah. And the company that actually made the cellophane, what they are is kind of like a mask. The cellophane mask go on top of the Marc Silk, and then the chemical burns away the area around the masks or just the masks? I don't know which. What it does, you totally cover your screen in this solution. then you put your image over it, and then you burn it, and it actually burns off the solution for the pictures that you've got. Okay, so it burns it well. The ink falls through that screen and goes onto your plastic. Okay, and then you can reuse the screen somehow? Well, all you do then is you just wipe that solution, that brown PVA glue, basically. that washes off. You use a special chemical and you wipe it on with a brush and then hose it off. Huh, and then you've got a fresh screen again. Then you've got a fresh screen. Wow. That's why I say as long as you've got your images you can always redo your plastic. And when you say your images, you mean you're saving the computer file or the cellophane stuff? The cellophane. Oh, okay, so the cellophane stuff is reusable too. Oh, absolutely. Okay. Absolutely. Okay. We've got all them packed away in a safe place. Huh. Well, cool. That's really cool. Nobody's ever really explained that to me. I want to try and dabble in it maybe this summer. I've got a friend in Colorado that does it. Any questions you've got, just let me know and I'll sort you through it easy enough. Cool. A friend of mine in Colorado has kind of made his own little small silkscreen thing. He does things that are just two, three, four colors, nothing too complicated. because the more colors... Good on him. I congratulate him. Yeah, the more colors you do, because like you said, if you've got one color off, you know, in your registration, which is the placement on the plastic, it screws everything up. And then you've got to start over. And when you're a private guy, well, me and Gordon are private guys as well, but when you're a guy doing it by yourself in your garage, you're trying to save every bit of money as you can, you know, because the ink's a dear, the screens are dear, the images are dear, the machine to do it's dear. you know all that for one set of plastics it's it's it's big money right but um yeah i mean we used to also do all the the apron decals and all the front door decals and all that all the stuff that you know all the belly stuff and all that they were a big seller but i thought they could have been bigger if i actually showed people how easy they were to apply but i never got a chance to do that so um yeah right mind you and i mean herb silvers is somebody that used a terrible lot of my apron decals. He used to do all that for his restorations. But I've noticed other people have copied ours now, so they're out there about. Right. And probably a lot of people are... Were you Marc Silk screening the decals? Yeah, absolutely. I used to love doing them. It was a really good thing. The bellies one I used to run off about 50 in a night, you know, and they were good. But, you know, we We did the Gottlieb signs that used to go on the top of the wedge heads, you know, the flipper skill game signs. Right. Yeah, I rattled off a heap of them. Actually, it was the same time we released ours, and about a week later Steve Young had also done them. So I took ours off sale because nobody was going to pay the postage to get it across the other side of the world when somebody else was doing it. So I just withdrew ours from sale. But all screen printing. We never did any digital printing for the plastics or decals or anything like that. It was all genuine screen printing. Cool, cool. All right, Lee, well, is there anything else you want to add? Well, no, I think we've just about covered everything. You've got no other questions that I can try and sort of help anybody out with at all? Yeah, no, it's been great. And believe me, if I try and figure out this Marc Silk screening thing over the summer, I'm going to be knocking on your door. Most definitely. You keep in contact with me and I'll try and help you out. I mean, I've done it for that many years. Either me or Gordon can put you in the right way. Or if I can send samples over to you or images just so you get a better understanding of how it works. I mean, it's all right for me to sit here and prattle on about it. But unless you've got certain things in front of you, you're not going to know what I'm talking about. So if I can send a package over with some sort of explanation for you, I certainly will. Okay, cool. All right. Because if somebody can keep doing these posts, I mean, I'd love to do it. but I really would, but I just can't see myself doing it now. Right, right. Yeah. Okay, Lee, well, you take care, and thank you again. My pleasure, indeed, anytime. All right, you take care. Take care, and I'll see you later. All right, bye. Bye-bye. Okay, well, thank you very much, Lee. We really appreciate you spending the time to talk to us here at TopCast, and that's all for today's episode, And we'll see you next time with some more interviews and tech talk on TopCast.