You're listening to TopCast, this old pinball's online radio. For more information, visit them anytime. www.marvin3m.com slash TopCast Welcome to another episode of TopCast. Tonight, we're going to be having a special guest. and we're going to be talking more about the Big Bang Bar Project and also some high-end restorations by some guy that maybe a lot of you may or may not have ever heard of. Somebody that works kind of quietly but works very, very well and does some really quality work and somebody that's really been in the background of the hobby but helps us all a lot more than you would ever probably realize. So without any more ado, we're going to be giving him a call right now. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. Special guest. We're going to be calling Cary Stare. He once again worked on the Big Bang Bar Project. I'm going to be giving him a call right now. Get him on the phone. Hello? Kerry, how are you? It's Joshua Clay here. How are you doing? Hey, Joshua Clay. How are you doing today? Good. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, I can hear you. Okay, great. So we want to talk to you a little bit about your history in pinball and some of the restoration work that you've kind of done quietly for your clients and also about the Big Bang Bar project. Okay. Okay, great. Well, let's start with how you got into pinball. Rick Sheevy is completely to blame. He traded me parts for a computer he wanted for a Road Kings. That was the first pinball machine I ever had. And it was a lot of fun rebuilding that machine. It had some problems, but overall it was in real good shape. And after that, Rick got me two Cyclones, and I did those. And I actually got so insane on those, realizing that, you know, you could really redo these things, that I actually made Marc Silk screens, handmade Marc Silk screens for the Cyclone, and re-Marc Silk screened the entire cabinet. Really? Both. Actually, it was three cabinets. And then I did two pin bots, and then from there it just got kind of carried away and got into it pretty heavy. But Rick was the guy who got me hooked on it. And for those that don't know, Rick Trevi is kind of a Chicago area, I don't know, do you want to call him an icon? Can we call him that? Yeah. You know, he's been around the block. He's been there before. I mean, you know, he was back in the 80s. He was doing the stuff and buying truckloads of pinballs from operators that were closing. And he's been just, you know, I actually would use the word legend. but he's a spectacular person and just very knowledgeable. He was a great guy to kind of mentor me in the early couple of years doing this. I could always ask him questions, and he had a relationship with all the designers. He introduced me to Ted Estes and Duncan and half a dozen guys at his parties. Just a really great guy who's just been around the block. He doesn't show up, I don't think, on the news group or anything anymore, but he's got other things he's doing, but he's just a great guy. Anyway, he got me into it. Yeah, and he was the guy. He was actually working for a company that was doing UL testing for the Williams Bally Midway Company. Yeah, he was working for Lucent. Right, Lucent. One of those environmental chambers where they test it down to certain temperatures and all kinds of stuff. And he was actually doing testing, and he actually did testing on the games that Williams was doing. So he got a chance to get to know a lot of the guys through that. Yeah, and he saw all the games before they were available to the public. And he also got, a lot of times, he got to buy these games that they gave the lab for the testing. So a lot of times he'd end up with some really, really nice or just beautiful. Yeah, he always had some really neat stuff, no question about it. And the other thing that really made him legendary was he used to hold the Wednesday night party before Pinball Expo in Chicago every year, like clockwork. Yes, yes. You know, if someone were to come to me and say Rick wouldn't help, I'd be stunned because, you know, he just helps everybody. Yeah, and he also at his parties, the designers, the game designers would always show up. Yeah, he's good enough friends with a bunch of those guys that they would show. I've seen Pat Lawler at his parties. I've seen Ted Estes. You know, these guys respect him. He's been around for a long time, and he's just a really good guy. He's got no agenda. He's just there for the fun of it. I heard the reason he stopped the parties is that, you know, it would be like 2 a.m. and he'd kind of like try and get everybody out of there. And then he woke up the next morning and there was some guys like sleeping in his lawn from the night before because they didn't have any way. He lived like in the middle of nowhere and there was no way for him to get home. They were like from Belgium or something and they were like sleeping in his front lawn. And he said, well, I think that's it. He's a good guy and he's so giving, I'm sure that, you know. At some point, I think he started, he had 40, 50 guys there, and then it got to the point where there was 200 people. And you look at any house, 200 people, that's a boatload of people. I mean, you could barely walk in the place. But it was a place to be, and he always threw a great show, and there was always great people there. He was a really great guy. But anyway, he was totally responsible for getting me into it. So what year was that that you first started getting into it? You know, I'd have to say it was mid-'90s sometimes. I remember one of the first games I saw from him was, I think, No Good Gophers, or maybe that was a couple years into it. But I remember he had a No Good Gophers. He bought one on closeout for like $1,800. I was pretty jealous that I didn't have the $1,800 at the time. I'm kicking myself. But that was one of the games I saw at his place pretty early on. So somewhere around there. I think I'd been in the arcade side with him for a couple years before that, so maybe 93, 94, something like that. And did you, right out of the shoot, start doing restorations to the best of your abilities and just honing your skills? No. The first couple I got running and cleaned up, I didn't really know too much about all the different things. I just knew to get them running. Being an electrical engineer, I knew to get them running electronically and get the displays working and all the stuff working right. But then I began to see, playing at Rick's and seeing other people's games, that the setup on the game was kind of interesting. You know, having the flippers be a little more responsive, putting in all the right parts. I began to see that there was quite a lot to getting it set up to play well. And then from there, I began to see, you know, some of these games are cosmetically in a lot better shape. And, you know, about the time I got those Cyclones, I realized that my cabinets were wasted and so I said the artwork is pretty easy why not just re-Marc Silk screening them so I must have spent four or five hundred hours on that project re-screening those things, making the screens from hand stretching the Marc Silk by hand going through the whole thing but it was a kick it just looked gorgeous when it was done so we're not talking stenciling at that point, from the cyclones on I knew that there was a level that you could go to that was really out there. So you're not talking about stenciling the cabinets. You're talking about actually Marc Silk screening them. Yes. Yes, we built the screens. We built a little screen press, so we put the screen down on the cabinet, and we'd squeegee the ink. It wasn't even paint. It was ink onto the cabinet, and then we'd hit the cabinet with the UV ultraviolet lights to go ahead and lock it in, and then we'd put the other screen down and register it and then squeegee the ink through it. It's amazing I still have the sample that we did first I still have it here So what's the last cabinet that you ever tried that on? That was the first to the last Oh really? We never did that again It was just so much work And by the time I got done selling the Cyclones I realized I had worked for about 25 cents an hour Right It just didn't pay to do that But I mean you can If you really have a pressing need to go to that level Of course you can Now how many colors were on the cabinet? That's just a two-color. So you had to make two screens for each side. So you had to make four screens for the top, and then you had to make four screens for the bottom, and then two screens for the front. It doesn't sound like a lot, but ten handmade screens took a lot of time. So you paint them like you have the base black, and then you would do, and then a cyclone, what is red and yellow or something? It's orange and kind of a bright yellow. Right, okay. Okay, and you were using like Pantone style inks? You know, we didn't even get that technical. What we did was we took some samples and we went into the place where we bought inks and we just got as close as we could. I mean, I think they're exact matches, but we didn't even try to find the original Pantone colors or anything like that. It didn't even hit us that there would be a standard for that at that point in time. Interesting. Okay, now the screens, I mean, how did you actually make the screens? Like today, somehow they do it on the computer, then they do a negative or a positive and show it off to light, and it kind of makes the screen that way. But you obviously weren't doing that way, right? Well, we did it old school, and basically what I did was I took a 2x4 and I took a router and I cut a slot in the 2x4 all the way around. And then I took the 2x4 and made it into the shape of a cabinet, either the top or the bottom or the front, whatever we needed. And then I got the Marc Silk and laid it across there. And then what I did was I stripped 12-gauge wire and shoved it into the slot with the Marc Silk on either side of it and pushed it down with a screwdriver and worked my way all the way around until it was tight. And that's how we made it tight. And then we went ahead and coated the entire screen with a chemical kind of a paste that is photosensitive. And then we cut rubyliths on the artwork. We took a rubylith and cut it for each of the individual colors. Now, wait, wait, wait. What's a rubylith? Rubylith is kind of old school. It's what they used to do to copy artwork and stuff. It's a red and clear sheet together, and you kind of pin it up on the side of the artwork, and then you cut the figure out and then you strip the red off. So then you've got the white and the red, and that's why they call it a ruby lift. And anything that the red is there, it doesn't let the light through. And anything that's white, of course, lets the light through. So you'd make the image and put it on, you know, go ahead and lay the ruby lift down on the paste and then go ahead and shine a real bright light on it. And we had to go out to the hardware store and make our own light. I mean, you're supposed to do all this high-tech stuff with it. We were doing it for a song, but we got those screens made, and it was unbelievable. They came out great. Now, can you reuse those screens when you're all done? As a matter of fact, I've offered the screens to big-time cabinets. I still have the screens. But I'm not sure that they would be all that interested in making that cabinet at this time, maybe in the future. Right. Right. That's pretty interesting. I've never heard of anybody doing that before. Well, we didn't want to use stencils because we wanted to be able to reproduce it. I, at some point, envisioned that bunches of people would bring their cyclone cabinets to me and I'd screen them. That never worked out quite that way, but that's what the original plan was. And now, after you got done with the inks, do you clear coat the cabinet or anything? Nope. The inks are UV protected and UV sealed. I mean, that's how you treat it to get it to dry is with UV, and it's very durable. Really? Okay, so just like the original, basically. Basically. I'm guessing that, I don't know what exact process they used, but I'm guessing it was very similar. Because we were actually able to do the over-strike and everything just exact. I mean, you can't tell the difference between the cabinets we did and the cabinets from the factory with all the imperfections and everything. Wow. Okay, so what was your next big 25-cent-an-hour project that, you know? We went to compare pinbots, and that's the first place that we had to strip mylar off the play field, and that was brutal. We ended up using the heat gun or hair dryer technique and peeled them off. And while we were doing that, we ended up getting a high speed, and we peeled the mylar off that. Now, the high speed mylar was just unbelievable to get the glue. It was like 10, 12 hours to get the glue off, whereas the pin bots were 2, 3 hours to get the glue off. So I don't know if they used different adhesives on some of those, but, man, I swore I'd never do another high speed no matter what. It was so brutal. This was pre the concept of free spray for getting Mylar off, but of course that always... You know what? We were making it up as we go. This was probably I got to say this was probably 97 or 98 Right So I mean we weren even I don think I was not aware of anybody else doing anything like that Yeah the first time I heard about somebody removing mylar using the free-spray technique, this guy emailed me and he said, you know, I was watching that Apollo 13 movie with Tom Hanks, and he says... Somebody said, yeah, why don't we use duct tape, you know, in space, and one of the engineers said, No, it's too cold. It just delaminates. The adhesive just delaminates, and the tape comes right off. And he said it was like, you know, a light bulb going off. Hey, why can't I free spray Mylar off? Yeah. You know, and that was kind of the start of that. I forget the guy's name, though. He was like the guy that started the whole thing, and I can't remember his name for the whole life. I remember seeing that. I have never tried that to this day. It works really well. I shouldn't say it works really well. It just depends on the actual play field. Some playfields, it works amazing. It's just like it falls off when you do it. Others, it doesn't do a damn thing. You know, and you end up using either the hair dryer or the Goo Gone technique. So there's like three different ways of doing it. It just kind of depends on the play field. Some are easier to do than others. Absolutely. But the worst thing, like you said, is the glue. Oh, some of it was on there like the rock of Gibraltar, and then when you tried to get it off, you ended up taking off the lettering and just a mess. So what did you end up doing with the high speed when you got it all done? You know, it was so bad. It was so bad that I kind of gave up on it a little bit, and I said, you know, I'll get the glue off, but when it got done, the insert lettering was kind of screwed up, and it was one of those projects where I never should have bought it. It was way, way, way too far gone. You know, when you first get into it, you start thinking, oh, man, I can do anything. But there are some things that are worth it and some things that aren't. And I actually got to the point on that project where I had a buddy in the area who was just starting off with pinball, and he was looking for a project. I unloaded the project on him. And he got it working, and it works great, and he loves the game, and he wasn't too worried about the cosmetic stuff. All right. So I actually unloaded that project because it was such a mess. So what was the next step up? I got a fishtails. and that started my love affair with the WPC stuff. And that game was just a lot of fun. And that's probably the funnest. I can remember playing that game, Cyclone and that game, probably the two games that got me hooked on pinball more than anything. Just really good games. I mean, they're not complicated games or spectacular player games, but they're just a lot of fun. Very basic games. Anybody can get it. Fun to play. Right, right. Okay, so then I remember seeing a restoration you did on a Monster Bash. Yeah, that was a couple years later. You know, we got to the point right there in about 2000 where I tried a new thing. I took two used playfields. I took a Jurassic Park and a Twilight Zone, and I gave them to a guy that nobody had heard of. Wait, wait, wait. You put them in a room together, and they made it. No, almost. And it was Jurassic Zone or something. I took them both up to a guy named Bill Davis, who was a guy who said he could re-coat playfields. And so I said, go ahead and re-coat these, and I'll take them to the Expo in 2000, and we'll see what it looks like. And he impressed me. And I think at that point he impressed other people, too, taking a look at those two playfields. But bottom line is, when we realized we could do that with the playfields, we started to get less concerned about scratches and wear and other things because if you have a talented repaint guy and clear coat, you could pretty much bring any play field back to original or better. Right, right. And then a couple of years, there's like two or three years later, you've got that monster patch which is out on my website. I built that for a customer in Georgia, and then I realized how much it was to update the website, and I haven't done that too much in the future. I do have several on CD that I need to someday sit down and go ahead and put up on the web so people can see what was done, but I haven't gotten around to it. And you were building a lot of the metal parts, like the scoops and stuff, in stainless in that era, right? Yeah, I started in 2000, I think the Expo 2000. and we were talking to some guys at Rick's pre-expo party, and somebody pulled out an RFM protector that came on some of the factory games. And he said, you know, this is on some games but not on others. Do you think you can make something like that? And I said, oh, yeah, I can make something like that. So we turned that out in about three days. We whipped those things out. And that was the birth of the carry protectors. Yeah. You know, we never even thought of the over-the-top stuff, what Cliffy did. We never even thought about that. And I always thought that, you know, basically if you can protect that inside edge from getting beat up, there'd be no point coming over the top. But, you know, he's got a great idea in the fact that if the wear is already there and you can't hide that, you know, this is a great way to hide it by putting that protector there. Right. I use your protectors on, like, games that I've, you know, that either it's a new playfield install or it's something that I've gone through and fixed the hole and re-clear-coated it. I use yours. if it's just something that the plate feels okay and it's got some hole where you can use the cliffies and it kind of sharpens it up. Absolutely. We both have a great little niche. Many, many years ago we came to a gentleman's agreement that the bottom line is if it wasn't over the top, it was his, and if it was in the hole, it was mine. We have a great relationship, and we both make a great product that I think enhances and keeps pinball machines from getting destroyed. It's been a lot of fun doing that. Right, and you do it for pretty much all the WPC stuff, right? What's that? You make protectors for pretty much all the WPC ones, right? Not all, but most that have a hole that goes in. You know, like Twilight Zone, we didn't need to do it, but if you ever look at a Twilight Zone, there's not a lot of wear on that edge going into the slot machine because the pinball never touches the front edge, either going in or going out, so it really doesn't get tore up too bad. You mean because it hits that kind of that rounded scoop on the back, you mean? Yeah, the ball falls off the play field and hits the rounded scoop in the back, and when it's coming out, it goes up on top of that rounded scoop and usually hits coming down somewhere on the play field. It doesn't hit that front edge, so the front edge never gets tore up. Same thing with Star Trek and that center hole shot that starts all the modes. You don't see any wear there either. Now the neutral zone, because you're hitting that target and it's bouncing around, that edge gets chewed up. Right, right. But basically, wherever I saw a point at getting all these games in and restoring them, if I saw a place on the play field that was typically tore up, that's what I went ahead and did. So what other kind of restoration techniques or stuff that you did that was different or new or cutting edge for the time? You know, there's so many guys that do that, and it's been kind of beat to death in a bunch of different places. But, you know, I would say if someone were to say, what's the difference between you and Hutchins and Allen and some of the other guys that do just top-notch jobs, I would say that my biggest concern about a job is that the game is set up perfect. I like a game that plays perfect. I'm kind of a player first. So if I were to compare myself, I would say that, you know, I would say that my games will probably be set up better. But, you know, the bottom line is all these guys do spectacular work, and every year they get better and better, same as I do with the stuff we do. It's obviously a lot easier to rebuild a game if you've got all NOS parts. You can stuff into it. If you don't use any NOS parts, it's obviously a lot tougher to, you know, make it look sharp. Yeah, I've always kind of been the kind of guy that wanted to use what I had and just didn't want to go out and buy $1,000 worth of parts for a game. You know, I'm fairly frugal when it comes to this stuff, too, so that doesn't help either. But, you know, I've been doing a lot of stuff with, like, bead blasting and using ultrasonic cleaners and stuff like that, and that stuff works really well, but it's obviously not going to be as good as if you could buy a brand-new whatever it is, you know what I mean? that's got brand new sink plating or whatever. A lot of the stuff the last couple of years that we've been doing is trying to make reproductions or trying to make parts. The scared stiff slings are a great example. That's just a hard part to, if it's broken, it's a hard part to fix. It's a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. You can't do it. So that's one of the things we look for for reproductions just because if you're going to continue to reproduce games, you're going to continue to restore games, you need to have a steady supply of parts. And so, you know, that's been the crux of a lot of the stuff since 2000 happened, and Williams closed is can you get the parts. And that's why so many of us hoarded, I mean, kept parts, you know, in big quantities because we wanted to have the ability to restore games into the future. So, you know, you ended up buying 10 sets of this and 10 sets of that and 10 sets of this because you knew, you know, over the next couple of years, you were going to see that many games easily. Now, what do you think of, like, these new playfields coming out? All of a sudden, you know, you can get a play field for front house or whatever. You know, it's kind of interesting. You know, I applaud the effort. You know, part of the problem is that when you go to restore something, it's hard to get an exact. And, you know, the collector community, wrong or right, is kind of picky. and so you know I think as a guy who's building restoration parts or building reproduction parts you know you have to be careful because if you don't build a good enough part the collectors aren't going to want it and if you build too good a part so the collectors want it it may not be economically feasible yeah you price yourself out of the market exactly I mean you know if I can make something that costs a thousand dollars and it's absolutely perfect that's great but you can almost buy NOS playfields for that same amount so the bottom line is that you've got to build a play field that's cheap that is nice that everybody wants and is good enough for the collectors and really those are all mutually exclusive terms very hard to get them all in the same category the guys that have done the job they've done a great job but it's really hard to do that I've looked into doing that at one point Gene asked me to do that for him and I took a look at it and the equipment it would take and I said nah it's not cost effective It can't be done where you can make money. Now, are you still doing a lot of restoration projects for other people, for clients today? No, I've pretty much pulled the plug on a lot of that kind of activity. First of all, I'm busy, and I just don't have the time that I used to have. Secondly, again, it's really not a cost-effective endeavor for me. I just don't make enough. and bottom line is that, you know, this was a great hobby and then when I made it my business, it became a lot less fun and so I'm in the process right now of turning it back kind of into a hobby so that it's more fun. And, you know, I still make my scoops and my protectors and I'll continue to make multiple parts and that's kind of fun but, you know, the restoration becomes too much of a this guy wants it by this date and, you know, this didn't work out So I've got to start over and do that. It's just tough. Right. Chris Hutchins and Alan Schaub and some of the guys that do this on a regular basis, they're spectacular studs. I can't keep up with that. I wouldn't even want to try. Right, because they can put out product in a timely manner. Oh, yeah, absolutely. They're doing it full time. And for me, it's always been part-time because I have my regular computer business. So if my computer business takes off for three weeks and I can't get to it, I'm three weeks behind. Right, right. Okay. All right, let's take a little break. I'm going to run a couple ads, let you rest your voice, and we'll come back in about one minute, and we'll talk about the Big Bang Bar project and how you got involved in that. Okay. So just hold on a second. Don't go anywhere. Sure. 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 loan you my copy. Who knows where you'll take it to. You're going to have to go to PingGameJournal.com and get your own subscription. But, George, the guy says that each issue will get mailed whenever he feels like it. What's the deal with that? All right, George, I've got to go. I've got to call Elaine and tell her. I can't believe how good this magazine is. TopCast is brought to you by Pinball Life. Give your pinball machine new life with parts from Pinball Life. We ship pinball parts worldwide. Pinball Life is located in the great city of Chicago. Their phone number is 773-202-8758. We have an open door Ryan Policky, and you're welcome to call us with your questions and concerns. 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Central Time, Monday through Friday. Their website is at pinballlife.com. Pinball Life. No hassles, just the parts you need fast. Okay, we're back with Carrie Stare. Kerry, you still with me? Sure. Okay. I'm running a, back in 2005, the fall of 2005 at Expo, I went to BIT and saw you working on the Big Bang Bar project. And we've got a webcam, and right now I slipped a tape in, and I'm showing some video footage I took while I was there with you and a couple other people that were working there. So how did you get hooked into this Big Bang Bar project? How did that whole thing start out? Well, I got a call from one of the people that works with Gene down there, and he asked me if I would consider coming down and helping the project. They were in a situation where they needed some help with production and needed some help with getting a direction and getting it finished up. So I said yeah I come down and we talk and we see what we can do I went down and talked with Gene And you know Gene and Kim are just wonderful people And we sat and talked for I don know a couple hours well into the night And, you know, I said I'd take a crack at it. But, you know, I made it very clear to them that I didn't want to wrench all those games. I didn't want to make 200 games. I just was out of the scale of what I wanted to do. But I said I would, you know, definitely wrench the first dozen or so and make sure that the processes were in place and teach the guys how to do it and show them how to put it together and take it apart. And so we moved forward from there, and it was a project, and it had multiple issues and problems that were all worked through. And I've got to plug Gene a little bit here. He had so many opportunities to back out of that project and so many times where it just seemed like there were insurmountable odds, and he just kept plowing forward. and at great personal cost. You know, every guy that gets a Big Bang Bar is getting it because Gene was willing to lose money on it. And, you know, there's a lot to be said for the fact that the guy did exactly what he said he was going to do. But we got involved, and I got to the point where I think we had made the first dozen or so. And at that point, you know, I think they shipped a bunch of them for Rojas to beat Rojas over to Europe. And the guy who's been instrumental since that time on it is Fred. Fred has done a spectacular job of keeping everything together and working on it. He's been the guy that's been directly responsible for managing and making sure the other games were all built right. He's done just a great job. Just to let people know, the Rojas thing was that after the summer of, what, 2006, you couldn't ship anything to Europe that was lead-based. That's correct. So all the boards that were bought from White Co. through Capcom were made in the mid-90s, and of course they were all soldered with lead-based solder. So after that point, legally Gene couldn't get those into Europe, so he had to beat that deadline, which I think was July 2006. Yep, he had to beat the deadline. I don't remember how many games were shipped. It really wasn't something I was worried about. I was just worried about getting everybody trained. My job was more to make sure that the guys that were building them knew what they were doing, knew the steps to do it. You know, because there's a process to building anything that complicated, whether it's a car or a pinball machine or something. There's certain steps that have to be done in certain orders, and parts have to be pulled. You know, to get the process down to the shortest amount of time possible with a superior job, you know, you have to do it a certain way. So, you know, that was primarily my job was to get the production set up and running and make sure everybody knew what was going on. And, you know, it's a great project. And Gene and Fred and Kim and just a host of other people down there, I don't even remember everybody's name, but they just did a great job and continue to do a great job. And I believe they're, you know, from what I'm hearing on the news group, I believe they're almost finished with it. Yeah, we talked to Gene just the other night, and he said he has basically they're all done. He has ten more just to basically put the playfields in the cabinet and test them, and that's it. That's spectacular. You know, no one will ever know what kind of a big job that was, but that is a huge job to build pinball machines, especially if you've only got a couple guys. I mean, it's a huge job. Well, so when you came into the project, how big of a disarray was it in? Well, I wouldn't say it was in disarray. I would say that there was some focus and direction issues that needed to be resolved. And basically, you know, the way they presented it to me is they just needed a direction. We needed to move forward. What were the steps to get it to the next point and to keep it moving forward? And so we sat down and went through the process. You know, I'm an engineer, so for me, the process, you know, we grab a whiteboard and we say these are the things that need to be done. This is the order they need to be done in. and just kind of push the process along and see, you know, what are the steps to make this process happen. And so, you know, we just processed and moved forward. And, you know, I think at that time, and I don't know the history of this very well, so I may mess it up, but I think Bear Cave had been, the two guys with Bear Cave had been involved before then, and I think they had left for a variety of reasons. And, you know, basically they got to the point where they needed someone to just spearhead the production side of it. and that's why they called me. They knew that I was a production guy and I could get it done. So were they basically doing your job before you walked into it? You know, I can't really speak for what somebody else has done, but it was my understanding that they were basically handling the production before I got there. But again, I can't speak to what they were actually not doing because I wasn't there when they were there, but it was my understanding that they did the production. Now, when you walked into this, were all the parts available? I mean, was everything made and ready to basically just bolt onto these playfields? No, I wish it would have been that easy. There were a lot of sub-assemblies that were missing small parts. There were a lot of little parts that we didn't know we needed because we hadn't taken apart the original machine. And, you know, one of the first things I did was take the original machine all apart. And Gene was very worried about that. He was convinced I couldn't get it back together. but we were able to put it back together without too much trouble. But to figure it out, get the playfields dimpled, the big thing about a new play field is it has to be dimpled so the parts go on directly. Yeah, they go in the right place. I've got a lot of trash on my website about how to go through and build a paper template. Only this particular time we couldn't build a paper template because we had to do 200 games, and a paper template's just not going to stand up to 200 games. So we built a thin sheet of aluminum and built an aluminum template and had to drill the holes in the aluminum template and get the aluminum template set up. And so you had to do top and bottom with this template. You had to build two templates, really, right? Well, I actually built three templates. I built one for the bottom, and then I built one for the top right and one for the top left. And a lot of the holes in the bottom, like for the sling area and stuff, I just drilled those by, you know, just eyeballed those because they were relatively straightforward. But the ones at the top we wanted to go ahead and build a template for. So of all the things in this project that was the most challenging, what was it? Well, you mean challenging for me or challenging for the team? Well, I just mean for the whole project. I mean, you know, there had to be something that was just unbelievably difficult to achieve, you know, on many different levels. I mean, yeah, for you and the team, what was most challenging? I'd say the most challenging thing for me originally was the wiring harness. Getting that on, getting it all set up, getting it to work right, getting all the wiring colors soldered on. There's a lot of soldering on a wiring harness. The first couple that I built, it was just an amazing amount of work. It just took hours and hours of bending over and soldering things as fast as you could solder them. And my soldering skills are decent but are not production quality. So it took me a lot longer, I'm sure, than it took. I was watching the little girl that was working there for him. After she watched me do it, I watched her do it. She did it about a third of the time. It was kind of embarrassing. But I would say that getting that figured out, getting all the wiring done, that was probably my most complicated job. Now, who actually made the harnesses? You know, that's, it was quite a process. There were several people involved with, several companies involved with the making of the different parts and putting together the different sub-assemblies, because I obviously didn't want to do it, and of course Gene and company didn't want to do it, so they hired that out for a couple different people, and I don't remember exactly who was there for the wiring harnesses. The first couple that they did were pretty far off. There were wire colors that were wrong and some other issues, and that made it kind of exciting. You know, when you plug something in and you're not sure that the wires are right and you're trying to figure out which color goes where, it can be kind of exciting. So, I mean, we got it all straightened out, and I think eventually they switched to a different wiring harness manufacturer and got some of the issues straightened out. But making a wiring harness, you know, that's kind of a lost art. I mean, it's, you know, it's got the wire peg boards and the girls doing it. If you ever watch them do it at Stern or any place, It's quite a process to go ahead and build a wiring harness like that, old school. Well, is that how they were doing it for you? Yeah, that's how they were doing it. Because, you know, for people that haven't seen it, there's this giant, it must be an 8x8 sheet, and they put pegs in it, which is a location for, like, each switch, and then take a wire of the right color and wrap it around the peg and then route it through some other pegs and, you know, do that for each wire. And it's, like you said. Yeah, it's pretty labor-intensive. You know, that's the biggest problem with the cost on pinball machines is so much of it is so labor-intensive. So when they made that harness, were they making it that same way as Stern was doing it? I believe so. You know, they made the harnesses off-site, but that's what it looked like when we got the harnesses. It looked like that's the way they had made it. Do you know how much that particular assembly costs? I have no idea. Okay, I was just curious. One of the things I never asked. Yeah, you never asked. I never asked what the costs were. You didn't want to know. I really didn't want to know. Right. I didn't care. Bottom line is that my whole point was, hey, we need 15 of these parts soon because we're trying to put together 15 of these games. So, you know, I was more focused on, you know, that kind of stuff. I mean, as a matter of fact, the first play field that I started, I think I kind of ticked Gene off a little bit because I just grabbed a play field. I didn't even know there were differences in the play field. So I grabbed a prototype play field, and that's the one I did all the work on. As a matter of fact, I think Gene made a funny comment later on. He said, well, since this one's kind of messed up, you can have this one. Well, what do you mean? You made prototype playfields? Yeah, I think he made 10 or 15 prototype playfields with different color inserts and whatever the original 15 prototypes had, they had a different than what was specified in the print for the production games. And he did this on purpose? What's that? He did this on purpose? Yeah, he made 10 that were going to be special, I think, or 15. I can't remember the numbers. But he made several that were going to be special, and I grabbed one of those special playfields instead of one of the production playfields. And that was your experimental base. He wasn't too happy that I grabbed one of those. I didn't know there was a difference. I guess I had remembered him saying something about it, but I just didn't figure the prototypes would even be up at the production facility. I figured they would be the last ones done. And what are the prototypes? So I grabbed one of those and did all my work on that one. Did all your hacking. Anyway, he wasn't too happy about that. And so what was it, just different insert colors? Yeah, different insert colors, and there was a couple of, I don't remember what all the minor changes were, but there were some things that made it different. Huh. And what does Gene do with the prototypes? Were they sold at a higher dollar level? Yes, I believe they were sold to collectors who specified it, and I believe there was an additional cost. Again, when you start talking about the numbers and stuff, I really wasn't too concerned about that. My job was production, so I was always worried about, do I have enough of these to make this? Do I have enough to go and do this? So it was kind of different worries. Fred was more involved with the paperwork end of it and making sure the part numbers matched and the prints were right. He was doing that kind of stuff. I was more concerned with getting the playfields built. Now, was there any major mistakes where you bring a part in, you just spent $30,000 for a part, and then you find out, well, hell, it was the wrong part, or it didn't fit or something, and you had to remake it? I mean, I've heard stories that Gene went, if there was a mistake to be made in this process, Gene made it and paid for it. Which is part of, you know, one of the reasons, because he's brand new, he's never done any of this before. Or, you know, I just can't imagine how complicated this whole thing would be. You know, I think the truth of the matter is that there were some mistakes made, but I don't think they were Gene's mistakes. I think the prints were wrong, or the people that made it off the print, they made a mirror image instead of what the print said, or stuff like that. But there actually wasn't that many mistakes made. And, you know, there were a couple of show stoppers or show slowdowns that occurred. The first was the wiring harnesses really dragged out, and that slowed us down. The second was the playfield clear coating that Churchill did was just unbelievable. I mean, it was too thin in areas and too thick in other areas, and it just looked like they had done it in a big hurry, and it just looked like crap. It wasn't mixed right, so it was too soft. And it was, you know, there was the first play field that we got up and started playing, we realized that it was scratching the heck out of it after 50 games. And we said, you know, this isn't the way a diamond plate or, you know, a clear coat is supposed to wear. And these things have been drying for a year. So right then and there, Gene made a decision that, you know, we were going to do this right. And so we took apart the five or six playfields we had done, and we took all the playfields to make, but I'm sure it was expensive. It couldn't have been cheap. Now, who did that? Did Churchill do it again? No, he had somebody in-house do it. He had somebody that he knew down there that could do clear coat, and they went ahead and did it in-house. He's got his own clear coating area room, painting room, now that he's doing playfields and stuff in, so they used that room. And they did it themselves, because Churchill wasn't going to do anything for us. Was it because the production numbers were so small, you only needed 200 playfields, so they were just not very receptive to anything? I don think Churchill cared It not that they a bad company or they bad people It just that it was such a small job I sure that in the cosmic scheme of things they did it as a favor and they didn't want anything more to do with it. Right. It was done poorly to start with, and that caused problems, and we had to go back and redo some stuff. And that slowed things down. But I think that's the biggest problem that we had, per se. I'm sure Fred, if he was on the phone right now, could correct me and say there were other issues, but for the most part, you know, Fred handled the issues that came up. He got the stuff done. He got the production parts in. You know, if there was a part that was made wrong, we sent it back and had it remade. You know, there was relatively minor amounts of that, though. You know, I don't know what you've heard, but there wasn't that many problems. Right. There were some things that were done incorrectly, but more from an inexperience and the prints were wrong or the print was different than actual or something along those lines. And, you know, any kind of an engineer, anybody that's determined and has a can-do attitude, you just work through those things. Yeah, I just, I heard stuff like, you know, Gene would order a part and spend, you know, 20 grand to have the part made and then found out that, you know, some guy in Chicago had, you know, bought some Capcom stuff and had a whole garage full of them and was willing to sell them for, you know. So, you know, hundreds of dollars or something. Yeah, well, you know, I had a bunch of capcom stuff that Gene ended up purchasing from me that we did some horse trading on towards a Big Bang Bar and stuff. And, you know, it saved some time, I'm sure. But, you know, the bottom line is that the prints were pretty much right and everything was pretty much done, you know, the way the prints were specified. And, you know, there were some issues that had to be worked through. But all in all, it was, you know, it was just something that you go through in any process that complicated. you're going to have glitches. Now, Gene's talking about doing Kingpin. If he does go ahead with that project, do you see that as like he's gone, he now has this experience, and do you think that project will go just that much more smooth? Well, I've got to be honest. I have some reservations about Kingpin. First of all, it's a game I would have rather done first because I like the game better. But I think the difference for Gene is going to be, I don't think he has any more board sets left. So he's going to have to remanufacture the boards. Right. I don't think that's going to be nearly a slam dunk. I think that's going to be complicated. I think that they've got some really significant technical issues they're going to have to resolve. Are those chips still available? Can they get them made for the price that he thinks he can get them made for? the one chip that nobody seems to know what it does. Are they going to get a hold of the guy and buy the rights to figure out what that chip does? They've got those kind of issues just on the chips. The other difference is I think Big Bang Bar, they had the bill of materials and they had the complete set of drawings. I don't think they've got that for Kingpin. So that's a big difference when all the engineering's not done. How about from, like on the top side of the play field, there seems to be a lot of molded plastics on Kingpin. Are those going to be, you know... Well, that kind of stuff can all be duplicated. The problem is, is that do you have drawings? Right. See, what it comes down to on all that stuff is if you can't send drawings to the manufacturer, what do you send them? Right. You send them apart and say, make a bunch like this. He looks at you like you're crazy. So you've got to give me drawings. So, you know, the problem is that there might be 900 or 1,000 drawings on that game. Are you going to pay somebody to AutoCAD all those drawings? And how much is that going to cost? Right. And, you know, that may be just an outrageous sum of money. And if you're only trying to divide that up amongst 300 games, that's brutal. You know, see, the whole thing about a pinball machine is the economy of scale. You know, we can spend $25,000 or $50,000 or $100,000 on engineering because we're making $5,000 of these games. It only works out to $125 a game. When you're only making 300 games, there's no economy of scale whatsoever. And that's why individual games, when someone talks about making a run of 300, the games have to be hideously expensive to make. And they have to sell for hideously expensive or else you lose your shirt on it. And I don't think Gene's ready to lose what he lost on Big Bang Bar. You know, when we talked to him last week, he said he lost like $300,000 on that project. I don't think he's planning on doing that with Kingpin, that's for sure. You know, who would? But honestly, unless he charges like $10,000 for Kingpin, he's going to lose the same amount of money. Because without those drawings being done, without some of that other stuff being done, he has to spend a lot of money to get all that stuff done to get it to the point where Big Bang Bar started. Because remember, with Big Bang Bar, he started with all those board sets, and he started with all those drawings. It's a big deal if you don't have both of those. So, you know, I wish him luck. I want Kingpin to be successful. So I'd like to get a kingpin. It's a beautiful game. And I think it's more fun to play than Big Bang Bar, in my personal opinion. But, you know, I just want Gene to be successful, too, because the number of manufacturers that can afford to take a $300,000 hit on a project is a pretty small number. Most of them go out of business for something like that. So I want him to be successful next time, because if he's not successful and he doesn't make money to help pay off this loss on this one, then he's out of business. so you know I would like to see him be successful and I just hope he does the math on what it's going to cost and has a real good idea what that math is going to be because otherwise if he picks a number in the sky based on anything that Big Bang Bar was he could get hurt again and I just don't want to see him lose a bunch of money as far as like the timing you know Big Bang Bar took what three years is it three years or four years I guess three years do you think Kingpin given the problems that you just outlined do you think that's going to take a lot longer or do you think maybe he could do it quicker? You know production issues with that, Gene and I always would tell Gene, I said he would ask how long Big Bang Bar is going to take and I said well how many people are going to be building them because the bottom line is whenever you ask the question how long you have to say well how many people are working on it. If I have 50 people working on it we could be done in a year and a half. If I have five people working on it, it's going to be five years. The bottom line is, it's all how many guys working on it, and how many games can they do a week, and then you multiply it out, and that's what you get. Speaking of which, how many people were actually doing assembly on Big Bang Bar? And where did you get these people from? You know, he ended up hiring a company up in Chicago, and I'm not familiar with the names, nor do I even want to say them on the air, but the companies that he hired had, you know, five, ten employees that were working on it. He had five or ten employees working on the bottoms, and then they'd go over to the other side, and five or ten employees working on the tops. And so, you know, if there's enough people doing it, and you're paying a set fee per unit, you know, you just factor that in. It's not a big deal. But all of production comes down to, you know, when you talk about how long, it's just how many people. Right. Right. Right. Right. So you said you like Kingpin better. What do you like about Kingpin that's better? You know, Kingpin is kind of an unusual game in the fact that it has two different modes. It's kind of like Safecracker. You know, Safecracker, you have a regular mode, and then you have this assault mode, which is kind of interesting. Kingpin's kind of the same way. You can play it in a regular mode, where you're playing just whenever you lose the ball, that's the end of your ball. Or you can play it in a timed mode. and the time mode's pretty cool. It's kind of like Safecracker again, but the Mafia or the Swingin' 20s kind of theme with the Kingpin being the gangster, kind of a better theme for me in a family-oriented type house. I mean, the actually Big Bang Bar and Kingpin, neither one of them are particularly family-oriented, but it's a lot easier to sell the wife and kids, I suppose, on the gangster than it is on the topless serving girls and stuff. Right. So for me, that's part of it. So does Kingpin give you a choice, like at the beginning of the game, pick time mode or pick standard mode type thing? You know, I've only played the game twice, so I don't know whether that's actually in the ROMs where you have to go into and change a setting or whether it's something that you can choose at the beginning. Okay. But I do know that that is possible. It's a neat game. We'll be right back. I'm just going to run a 46-second ad, and we'll be right back, Kerry. Hold on. TopCast is brought to you by Marco Specialties, your pinball parts superstore. Visit their website at marcospecialties.com. You can search for parts by game name, game make, or part number. Marco Specialties was founded in 1985 and is headquartered in Lexington, South Carolina. They specialize in pinball parts, supplies, books, and anything pinball. Marco has been online since 1996 and is the web's oldest and largest pinball parts supplier. Their new 12,000 square foot distribution center services 25,000 customers in over 50 countries. Feel free to call Marco Specialties at 803-957-5500. Marco Specialties, your pinball parts superstore at marcospecialties.com. Okay, we're back with Cary. Cary Stare, once again, he helps with the Big Bang Bar Project. So overall, how long were you actually working on this project, Kerry? You know, I think we started in September, and my part of it was finished by, I want to say, June. Okay. And were you, you know, I mean, did you get along okay with Gene? Oh, absolutely. Gene's like everybody's grandpa. He's a good guy. You know, he's got his quirks, and he's a little eccentric like everybody's grandpa, But he's a nice guy, and he means well, and I think he's always got everyone's best interest at heart. I mean, there's not an evil bone in his body. He's just a nice guy. Yeah, I kind of get that feeling talking to him that, you know, he's straight up in that he's not going to cause anybody any problems. He's not trying to hurt anybody. He's not trying to steal any money from you or get you for anything. He just wants to get the job done, and he's a good guy. And he's a little eccentric, but I guess you'd almost have to be to take a project on like this. You know what, if he wasn't eccentric, he'd never have done the project. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Now, have you played any of his Pinball 2000 games? I have played the Pinball 2000 games he has set up at his place. You mean like the Wizard Box? Yes. Okay, because, you know, he was talking about that, too. You know, I don't know if he could make, you know, like a replacement play field for, you know, where you could take a Wizard Black's play field and slip it into a Revenge for Mars, you know, frame. But, you know, what's your feeling on that game? You know, in my opinion, I think the game would have been the best of the pinball. 2,000 games would have been even better than RFM. It has a lot of promise. The software that he has in the game that I saw and played is very unfinished. It's basically just a counter software. I mean, as you hit targets and stuff, it adds points, and there's some very low-level graphics that are done to do all that stuff. But it is a functional game in the fact that it does have a score and it does start a ball and finish a ball. But there's really not too much in the way of sound and video that's done. It's just kind of almost like a caretaker program or kind of the default 2000 program. And it's got some stuff for Wizard Blocks, but it's really not ready to be finished. I think you'd have probably 85% or 80% of the software still to write on that to make that into a finished game. Right. Now, how about Kingpin Software? How finished did that feel? You know, again, I've only played the game twice, but I think the software on Kingpin feels very finished. I think it's a finished game. I think the five or six people that have the game, and I happen to be good friends with one of the guys that has it, would say it's a good game. And, I mean, it's a lot of fun. Was there any particular, you know, playfield toys or features or anything that, you know, really kind of stood out in your mind? You know, I remember playing the game, and I remember doing fairly well at playing the game. But I'll be honest with you, it was five or six years ago, and I remember very little of the gameplay itself. I just remember thinking to myself at the time, this is a neat game. I hope someday I can get one of these. and then I asked the guy what he had into it, and I said, well, I guess we won't be getting one of those. Right. Interesting. Now, whose were you playing? At the time, I believe the owner was Pat Choi. I don't want to talk about who owned it now. Oh, Pat had a kingpin, huh? It's not really a place, but Pat owned it at the time, and I remember playing that and Big Bang Bar both. They were together in the same place. He had one of each, and they were a lot of fun to play. Wow. Wow. Pat did a nice seminar at the last Expo. So, you know, it's kind of interesting that he had them both, but he sold them then, in a sense, is what you're saying. Yeah, I think he got them, and I think he played them, and I think he realized that, you know, he either didn't want to keep them or he saw an opportunity to turn a profit. You know, the problem is when you're in the pinball business as a business, you know, you can't get emotionally attached to the games, and that's tough, because, you know, when you spend 400 hours rebuilding a game, you're emotionally attached to it, whether you like it or not. Right, right, yeah, be it or not Well we've been going at it for an hour I'm going to take it to a close Is there anything else you'd like to add, Kerry? No, I mean, you know Feel free to call me anytime If you want to talk about stuff Like I said, I don't know how much I can add I really was just kind of a minor part of everything The guy you're really on interview If you want to talk about Big Bang Bar is Fred Because he's been the guy that's handled The vast majority of the issues there And if you've already talked with Gene Between Gene and Fred, they know 99% of what's going on with that project. Okay. All right. Well, thank you, Kerry. I really appreciate it. And this is, again, Kerry Stare talking about his experience with Big Bang Bar. This is TopCast, and that's all for tonight. Thanks again, Kerry. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Joshua Clay. Take care. Bye. Bye.