This is the EM Journeys Pinball Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the EM Pinball Journeys Podcast. I'm David Morgan. I'm so glad to be joined today by Gabe Pribil, who lives in Lincoln, Nebraska. Gabe is a pinball enthusiast and also runs his own pinball repair business called Pribs Pinball Repair. In addition to pinball repair, Gabe can repair your arcade machine, including non-pinball electromechanical games. He also has an extremely EM pinball friendly YouTube channel where he plays pinball machines that he fixed up and then talks through completed repairs while giving a visual tour inside the game. Gabe is an operator of pinball machines in five locations in the Lincoln and Omaha area. The pinball shows that he attends are Pinball Expo and the Texas Pinball Festival. Hello Gabe, how are you doing today? I'm doing all right, Mr. David. How about yourself? I'm doing very well, thanks. It's so great to talk with you. Great to be on here, you know. Like I said earlier, it's kind of like my debut pinball podcast interview or what have you. I'm going to do many more in the future and kind of keep myself in the scene and meet lots of friendly faces and maybe have people actually recognize me when they get to the shows. I'm never going to be a Todd Tucky, but I'd like to be like a, oh hey, that's that one guy in Nebraska who does pinball. I'm so excited to talk with you about EMs and what you're up to as well as your future plans. Let's start off with how you got into the pinball hobby. When did it start? Well, it started for me when I was a kid. My grandparents, they live up in Springfield, Nebraska, which at this point we're just going to call Omaha because Omaha is one of those cities where you've got a bunch of smaller cities that are all next to it. Steve Finkelstein, DJ Carlin daniel keithm condiciones Linus He's got all the I want to Google What's anything I've been in Easter and I'd be sitting on a stool just wailing away at the flippers in the basement. You know, it's just been home use only in their house ever since it was made in the year 2000. And I got into pinball, I really enjoyed that. Another way that I got into pinball was through the Williams Arcade Collection for the Nintendo Wii. You might know that they also released a Gottlieb collection for like the PlayStation and whatnot. I only had the one on the Wii and that had a lot of heavy hitter machines like Whirlwind and Funhaus, Taxi, Black Knight. You'd just sit there with your Wii remote and nunchuck and then the V button on the Wii remote would be the right flipper and then the Z button on the nunchuck would be the left flipper. And you'd just sit there and watch the screen and play pinball. And I really enjoyed playing pinball a lot when I was a kid just from the little bit that I got of it. Unfortunately, being born in the year 2001, there weren't many arcades left when I was growing up. Like, the only place I could remember even publicly having a pinball machine was there was a Revenge from Mars Pinball 2000 in a skating rink that shut down. So, I mean, it's not even there anymore. And there was maybe an Addams Family at a mini golf course locally. But that was about it for me growing up. Played a lot of pinball arcade on the Kindle Fire, which was the iPad you used to download books on back in the day. On the Kindle Fire one specifically, I played a lot of Haunted House and Genie. I was a big fan of Haunted House. I was like, if I ever get a real pinball machine, I want Haunted House to be the first one. When I turned 18, I scoured Marketplace on Facebook and I'm looking for one and they had a haunted house listed for I think $2,200 down in Dallas, Texas, 12 hours away from where I was living or up here in Lincoln. And I'm still living with my parents at this point. I had just turned 18. I hadn't moved out yet. And I'm like, oh, I gotta get this pinball machine. I messaged the guy and in hindsight, this was probably the dumbest thing I could have done. But I was so excited, I actually offered him even more money. Oh wow. I don't know what he had listed. I think I ended up paying like $2,700 for it? You didn't want anybody to see it. Yeah, $2,750. I got it here. Yeah, it was $2,750. I drove to Keller, Texas, 600 miles away. Then I ended up having to spend another grand on repairs, of course, because I bought a haunted house. You know, you can't ever have the seller up kicker working properly on that thing. You know, that was a huge investment, but eventually it got playing properly. It was sitting in my parents' basement. And at least through paying a local guy to do the repairs for it, I got into the kind of, oh, why is it broken? What can I do to fix it? You know, I'd sit there and I'd watch him. I'd try understanding what he was doing every time he was here. That kind of helped me get a little more electronically and mechanically inclined, but you know I had always been fascinated with pinball and K'nex growing up, anything that could move and was mechanical I was a big fan of. I even built a pinball machine out of wood right between like eighth and ninth grade over the summer. I just cut a bunch of plywood into pieces with a saw and made it work on marbles through a couple ramps and capped balls in there. And it's disassembled sitting on top of my parents' loft above their garage. But I still got it. It's kind of a neat little piece of history, not like it ever worked well or had electricity with it. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. And I was like, oh, you're going to spend it all on a pinball machine. And look at me now. I'm still spending all my money on pinball machines and I'm 24 now. So I'm curious, at what point did pinball shift from being just a hobby to something more serious for you? Well, after I bought Haunted House when I was 18, that sat in my parents' basement, moved out, and then when I was 19 in my own place, I bought my second machine. It was the Whirlwind. I'm a fan of swords. I bought a sword in North Newton, Kansas for $3,300. Now it's about three hours away. And then while I was still 19, I bought Swords of Fury, which I'm a huge fan of swords. That was a killer deal too. It was $1,500. It was in Kansas City. And it booted, it worked, it played enough. There was no backbox lights. The ramp was beat to crap, but I was like, hey, you know, it's a good deal. So at this point I'm just, I stopped working at Burger King, I moved out on my own and I started working at Menards where I'm making 10 bucks an hour and 13 bucks an hour on Saturdays and Sundays. And it's like, I am paying 500 bucks a month for this apartment, this one bedroom, and I'm barely able to survive. After being at Menards for six months because they wouldn't even let me go to full time, They just perpetually kept me at part-time even though I wasn't in school. That was my only job. I got to work at the prison. So that was the, I was a corrections corporal at the Lincoln Correctional Center, which is the media maximum security prison local to Lincoln. So that was, that was an interesting time. I was there about 15 months. Horrible things to say about that, but I can do that and that's definitely another non-pinball I'm a fan of Pinball, but I'm driving it back to pinball. Being able to at least make 20 bucks an hour and work like 70 hour work weeks, that gave me enough money to start buying more machines. I bought that up. I followed that up with my very first EM. I bought a Gottlieb Hi Hand for $1,100 and then I bought a Williams Black Knight for R�stellen company, at the spooky pinball factory oh wow and the guy was going to pick up a brand new rick and morty right off the line and give me his indiana jones and i got to tour the spooky pinball factory that's awesome that was pretty neat but yeah then i was getting all these machines and i was filling up my my new two-bedroom apartment i was living in but then it's like i've got six seven eight machines in my place right right after that i got my my actual I got Skyline, I got King of Diamonds, and these EMs weren't hardly working. They were broken to crap, and I'm like, I need to know how to actually fix these. So, at this time, while I was, I kind of just worked at the prison 15 months. I made enough money to survive for a little while without income, and then I got a great I'm here with Steve Chalisi, the owner of the pinball machine, and I'm here with Steve Chalisi, the owner of the pinball machine. Steve Chalisi is a great guy. He's been doing pinball repair for over 40 years of his life. Oh, wow. He's a great older gentleman. He lived up in Omaha. His name is Steve Chalisi. He was hired to fix a bunch of machines at a local place that had about 50 pinball machines. This guy who fixed my haunted house, he said, hey, the other pinball fixer in town, Steve, he got hired to do all this work for this place and fix all their EMs. You want to kind of like internship under him and learn how to fix EMs? And I'm like, hell yeah, sure. So, went ahead and got essentially about six months of unpaid labor to just go through about 40 or so Gottlieb wedgeheads, almost all of them were. There were a couple Williams games in there, they had a Magic City, they had an Apollo, but everything else was a Gottlieb. We went through them all, cleaned them all up, I learned how to wax the fields a lot, And then I got to learn actual repair and a bunch of interesting stories out of that place. I could talk for a while about some of the... Yeah, please do. ...some of the fun repairs. I won't talk too much about that place. The people who owned the place that had all those machines were not the kindest people to me and they kind of got rid of me eventually. But after I was done with the initial six months of repair, I was their main repair guy for the next about year and a half or so, where I'd go in about once every week or once every two weeks for about eight hours and upkeep their like 55 machines, which was not enough time to be doing that. Like I, and mind you that this is one of those locations where there are a bunch of kids that are insane. Like, they would pull the, like the gun game with the, there's a light gun game with triggers, and they'd pull the gun straight out of the frickin' machine. They, I saw a broken off key jammed into Elvira's coin slot. I've seen, like, oh there was, there was horrid stuff there. One of the funniest ones when we were initially fixing all the machines was the old Gottlieb photo finish there, which is that 861 wedge head. The bumpers locked on at one point and right before they stopped playing all these machines, somebody said there might have been an electrical fire in the back room at one point. And they thought maybe it was Photo Finish that was responsible. We opened it up and both the green pop bumpers locked on, fried their coils, and were on fire at one point to where they charred the entire underside of the playfield. There was a bundle of wires going next to one of them and it completely burned all the insulation off these wires. It was a whole mess and Steve was able to replace the coil, get all that wire redone with new wire and it worked when we plugged it in. So, no, he's, he was very good at it, but the best part about that thing was the, uh, the light bulb inside the pop bumper still worked. It was completely black on the outside. You couldn't see the light bulb. We put it in a socket and you could see like a little glimmer. It was like so dim, but it was like, yeah, the light's still working inside of there. You know, the coil right under the bumper fried to the point of melting the skirt and the probably would have burned the entire place down had the back door not been on and the coin door not been on. Because we were like, this thing really was on fire. Fire probably went out before it ignited the playfield due to a lack of oxygen. But, yeah, that was a bit wild. But yeah, no, that's kind of when pinball became more of a more of a serious business for me. As I started learning the EM repair, I started doing house calls, fixing a couple of people's EM machines. And then after doing EMs for about six months to a year, I started branching off into solid state pinball machines, of which I'm pretty confident in being able to fix almost all of them now. Now there are still a couple issues. Like I just had to return a gentleman's space shuttle board and I didn't even charge him anything because I felt so bad because I had the board for a couple months. I tried getting all the battery acid damage off. I ordered over $100 worth of new chips and stuff for the board. I got a new capacitor kit from Big Daddy I threw in there. I did all that work, which, I mean, I actually lost money doing work for them, and I wasn't able to get the sound working. The game worked, Space Shuttle played, and I fixed the drop target while I was there, but there was so much battery damage in the bottom right portion of the board, I couldn't get the sound to come on. And I'm just sitting there trying all this stuff. I'm right Benith threshold where I'm like, I think it's long overdue for me to get the Leon Boers test ROM. I don't know if you've seen stuff like that where you can put the Leon ROM in and it'll tell you like what's wrong with the machine and kind of do a deeper diagnostic on the CPU board. But that's that's more solid state electronic stuff. You know, this is this is the EM pinball journey. I'm a fan of your games. I'm a fan of your games. Most of my machines are EMs anyways. I like solid-state games quite a bit, but EMs are my passion. Yeah, definitely. I've noticed that your collection is mostly 50s and 60s EMs. Yeah. I'm curious about... My experience is mostly 70s EMs, so I'm curious about your experiences with working on games from the 50s and 60s. Well, I mean, games from the 50s and 60s are genuinely, actually probably more difficult than most of the 70s games just based off of the, uh, they kind of refined the formula, especially Gottlieb when it came to the 70s EMs. They were like, let's put the player unit all in one unit. Let's put all this other stuff. Like, you look at a 70s EM backbox, you've got ball count, you've got score reels, you've got three relays to do the score reels. You have the tiny little match unit that's in the AS relay, and you have the replay unit, and that's the entire head. Then you look at a 60s Gottlieb, especially like my four-player high score, you've got 16 score reels in there, you've got player unit that also does the ball count, but you also have the huge match unit that's a full-size stepper. You have, like, there's just so much more in those 60s and 50s games, but the main reason I have those is not only is that what I worked on back when I was fixing those machines at a place in Omaha that had like 50 of them, but they're also a lot cheaper. I can find them a lot easier on Facebook Marketplace than those 70s games. I grab 70s games when I find them cheap. On Marketplace I probably have about seven, I think I counted, seven or eight 70s EMs, but it's just so much harder to find those than it is to find those two-inch flipper games I've noticed. Mm-hmm. Yep, that makes sense. In the Northeast where I am, there are a lot of two-inch flipper games available. Yeah. Typically, it's a really good price. I mean, and you can find the 70s EMs available as well. What I'm really saying is you can't find the project ones available. Like that's also why I don't have like I have like two dot matrix display games. I have Roadshow and I have Indiana Jones. Once you get a machine that's more highly regarded, more well renowned, oftentimes people those are the ones that they want to pay to keep working. So it's hard to find a broken one that somebody's neglected and it's really cheap on marketplace. A lot of people will not care about a two-inch flipper game and leave it so we're the point. I just bought a Gottlieb Domino for 80 bucks. It had a mouse living in it and he bit up all the relay labels and the schematics and he made a nest with it on the bottom board. Like that's the type of stuff I buy. Usually the 70s ones don't get to that condition. But hey, I have an outer space that I got for free that was sitting in a barn. I had chicken poop on top of the backbox and the whole playfield had been taken apart already and put into little styrofoam cups, all the playfield parts. And then, what was it? So it gave you a head start? Yeah, yeah, mud daubers on the score reels in the back. Somebody tried repainting the cabinet at one point and they gave up halfway through. So, yeah, no, that's all that one machine. I've got a bunch of fun, broken stuff lined up. That's why I said right before we started this interview, I updated my spreadsheet that I'm looking at right now for how many pinball machines I own. I'm up to 126 machines and maybe only about 40 of those are working and that's probably a pretty lofty estimate. That's a nice, nice collection. And granted, not all of them are pinball. I'd say maybe a hundred of which are pinball, maybe a little more. I also have my slot machines and my gambling machines and my change machines and my one crane machine in here as well. But my couple arcade cabinets are here as well, but it's definitely over 100 for the pure pinball, so that's a good deal. Tell me about the games and locations where you're an operator of pinball machines, including your newest location, Vintage Oasis Omaha. Yeah, definitely. I put out a listing on Marketplace a while ago about, oh, hey, I'll rent my pinball machines out to you for 30 bucks a month and then for free if you have a location and then I can just bring my machine there, set it up for free, and then I can split the coins with you. And I've got that deal going at about five different locations. I threw my old Pigeon Bat game, it was a Williams pinch hitter, in a hair salon in Beatrice called Touchdown. I was like, ooh, this is a sports themed hair salon, I'll throw my baseball game in here. Threw that in there. The first location I ever put anything was the Godfather's Pizza in, I actually got a house call to work on a gentleman's mousing around machine. I don't know if you've seen that, the one where the mice are trying to... it's like Mousetrap, it's Tom and Jerry. But, yeah, I got a house call to fix that machine for a gentleman in Omaha, and he goes, Oh yeah, I've had this machine a while, I used to own seven Godfather's pizzas, and now I only own two, and I'm a lawyer, I have my own company, and... John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Larry K. Sheats Jr., I've been swapping them out ever since. The current lineup in that place is my Williams Touchdown, my Williams Apollo, and then my old Gottlieb Pinwheel from 1953. Oh, nice. And I also have my Crystal Castles arcade cabinet in there with the Bentley Bear and collecting the red gems. I don't know if you've seen Crystal Castles, but it's very great. That was one of my favorite games when I was a kid. I loved that game. Yeah. I drove up to Minnesota, bought that one for like $1400 for stored. Probably paid a little too much for it, but I was like, ah, whatever, it's Crystal Castles. It was unique at the time, there was nothing like it. Yeah, my girlfriend, she lives out in Shell Rock, Iowa, and her parents have five arcade cabinets as well. One of them is Crystal Castles, so we actually have two Crystal Castles between us. I thought that was pretty funny. So among the pinball machines, what tends to be a good earner? What makes for a good earner on location? Not an EM pinball machine, I'll tell you that much. I will say, like, and I totally missed out on, I totally dropped the ball on the locations. I also have the two machines at a place called Alley Cat Vintage. I have my Magic City and my Gottlieb Kewpie doll there. Remember Mountain Right when Vintage Oasis opened, I'm like, oh, I don't have any multiplayer games in Vintage Oasis. I should bring Paul Bunyan into Vintage. So I swapped them out at that point and Vintage Oasis now has 20 of my machines. And, uh, I could probably read through the list, but it'd probably be much easier to, uh, just look it up on Pinball Maps, uh, the Pinball Map, uh, app on your phone, if you want to see the full list. It goes all the way from Flip A Card in 1970 all the way back to Humpty Dumpty, the first Flipper game in 1947. It's there taking nickels just like it was in 1947. Oh, that's nice. The first game with Flippers. That's a nice add to a nice lineup of EMs. Yeah, I also brought Humpty Dumpty and Tic Tac Toe, my Williams Tic Tac Toe. Took them out of Vintage Oasis and I brought them down to the most recent Texas Pinball Festival. Oh. So, I set them up next to the guy who brings his some of his wood rails and he set up Cinderella next to Humpty Dumpty and it's like the games are the exact same game except for the layout. Like seriously, the exact same layout. The only difference is Cinderella has a rollover button at the bottom that adds bonus and Humpty Dumpty does not The bonus kick out works a little different on Cinderella. The bottom kick out is normal bonus, the upper kick out is double bonus, whereas Humpty Dumpty, the bottom kick out, you just get your bonus and then the upper kick out lights your special up at the top or scores extra special for five replays when it's lit. Got all those games at Vintage Oasis, I hope they, I hope people will I'm hoping to start setting up a classics tournament here at, um, probably at the end of May, beginning of June. I'll have the very first ever Nebraska classics tournament because there's literally no EMs in all of Nebraska on location besides Vintage 08, besides the places I have my games, and then the place where I learned to fix all those games. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I did have one tournament once at my apartment. Oh, okay. And it wasn't really a tournament more so as it was just, hey, I have room kind of, and you guys can play my machines kind of. So I had like 15 or so people show up and they just played my games for a while. And that was nice, but once again at that point there was no EMs in my place except for I believe Mars Trek was still in there. Oh, okay. So I dropped that off at Ben & Joyce. I made a Beercade Beercade 2 and Big John Those are really the only places to even play pinball here And they all in Omaha And it like I gone to those tournaments I actually participated in one of them last last summer And they fun tournaments and all but it just I look at the internet and I see the pinball scene in almost everywhere else in the country And it like oh this place pales in comparison Like if I wanted to actually get a big pinball scene or a Jeff Peters, The Closest Tournament to me is about an hour and a half away. Yeah. I think there's some fun prizes to do for the tournament as well. I don't want it to just be, uh, I don't want there to be nothing. I'm trying to think of something, something unique to at least set the, set the thing I have apart. Uh, another thing I'm thinking of doing for that tournament is because I have, I have mostly replay games at Vinage Oasis. I have a couple of add-a-balls, but I'm hoping at least because I have them on when you win replays, you win off of a match, you win off of passing a certain score threshold, or you win off of winning a special. Well, at the end of a game, it's very obvious to see if somebody's won off of passing a score threshold or passing or getting a match number at the very end. You can account how many of the replays they won were off of both of those things. So I'm thinking, for example, let's say you're playing a game on Slick Chick and the replay score is at 1000 and you get 1100 and you match. Well, you win two replays. Well, that's not going to mean anything. But I'm thinking is for every special you win, you multiply your entire score, essentially. So if someone got 1100 on Slick Chick and they also scored one of the specials, their actual tournament score would be 2200. If they won two specials, their actual score would be 3300 because the way I see it, initially I was going to be like, hey, for every special you win, you know, you'll get to play another game and then it's the best of all the games that you're able to play off of getting your first special. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm trying to shoot up to the blue bumper and hit that a bunch for 100 points. Well, you know, if people are playing for specials, they're playing the games the way that they were made, and I think it's going to be a lot more fun to do that. So that's one thing I'm trying to set apart, you know. Wish you good luck with the tournaments. Yeah, I'm hoping it'll be fun, but yeah, we'll see. I'm curious, out of your personal collection, do you have a favorite or favorites? I am not sure for, uh, I really, like I said, I enjoy my Swords of Fury, I enjoy my Whirlwind, but for, uh, for EMs as it's concerned, uh, it's pretty tough because I'm sure my favorite would probably change if I fixed more of them, but I just have so many projects that, like, oh, I've only played so many of them. I, I'm a big fan of majorettes. If you've never played a majorette, you really should play a majorette. This is a great game. Everyone loves Juretz. I'm a big fan of Apollo. The Williams Apollo where you You do the countdown up the rocket and then you launch the ball in the back for Bagatelle. My mentor Steve, his favorite was Williams Riverboat, and I have one of those and it's okay. That's not my favorite. Yeah, if there were... I really enjoy Ice Review. If there were two games I'd like have to have probably if I only had two to pick from for my got leave it would probably be either majorettes or flipper fair if you've ever played flipper fair or subway those are both essentially anaball versions of crosstown and it is so much frickin fun it's like I mean it's fun when you get an extra ball sometimes you have an entire five ball game and you just can't catch a break. It just goes right down the side each ball. But if you're able to score that extra ball on that machine, you can score multiple in a row. You can just keep racking the center target without hitting another bumper to advance the yellow and the green out of sync. And you can also, if you get the four top lanes at the top, like majorettes, once you get the four lanes, you get the extra ball and then only two lanes The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. For my Williams, I have to go with my Williams Rocket from 1958, I believe. Oh, that whole Rocket is so much frickin' fun. It's got the same kind of rule set as Buckaroo and Spin Out, where you're trying to collect seven numbers and then every time you get four numbers in a row, you win a replay. But it is so difficult. For every rocket you have to collect, you've got five kick-out holes at the top to select the rocket. And this, they change your selection no matter what. If you advance the countdown or not, you get in that kick-out hole. If you get in kick-out hole number three, your rocket selection is now number three. Then, either from hitting the very top spot targets or the center two kick-out holes, you advance the countdown. The countdown starts at five, you hit in advance, it goes to four, goes to three, then two, Then one. Once you've advanced it past one, then all your yellow bumpers, all five of them, light up for fire when lit. You hit one of the yellow bumpers, you fire whatever rocket happens to be selected at that time, and then you have to repeat that entire process for every rocket you want to fire. It's not just, oh, hit the roto target, and you're immediately given the number, like buckaroo or cowboy. You actually have to do that much work for every number you want to spot. So it's, it is a tough game, but oh, it just, it has so much replayability. It seems like almost every game that you have on there, you're one rocket away from getting your replay. You've just got the one left that you were missing. And it's, it's that replay factor. My, uh, my mentor, Steve, back when I was learning under him, he would, he would call those teaser games. He would be like, oh, World Fair is a great teaser game. Oh, okay. Because you're always one number away from, or King of Diamonds is great for that. You're always one card away from getting the replay. That way you put another nickel in or another diamond. Yeah, Gottlieb made great teaser games back in the day. That's the terminology he used. So, I'm running with it. What year was the Rocket? Uh, Rocket, I believe, is 58 or 59. Oh, okay. Let me look it up. William... I'll have to look for that one. Oh, it's great. I saw it and I was like, oh, it's a pretty good deal. Let me see what I paid for it. Rocket. 600 bucks in Arnold, Missouri, 445 miles of driving. Oof. Or miles away, actually, I think. Mm-hmm. Yeah, no. 600 bucks for that thing. And the worst part about all those 50s games by far is, especially the Williams, you've Gotta pop all the inserts out and re-glue them because they are just too sunk into the field for you to just put like a little sticker of Mylar over them. But yeah, 1959. Gotcha. Nice. I'll keep my eye out for one. And it's actually a pretty desirable game as well. I forgot, I was checking the pin side. How many have you even sold on pin side? 3 ever. The listing prices were $1200, $3500, and $2500. So, yeah, they've only ever had 3 sales on Pinsight for Rocket. Those Williams games, and another reason I love those Williams games, is they went to 50 volt coils. I saw another question that you were going to ask me regarding the, what was it, the fuses? It was the fuses in Gutsher and that's another thing is the this specific vintage of Williams the late 50s wood rail vintage They also did this with like nags for example the one with the rotating pop bunkers Mm-hmm That's where we first figured it out when Steve and I were fixing the nags machine was at that other location We put all the fuses in it because it was missing a fuse And we powered it up and it immediately blew one of the fuses it was like violent it buzzes every time it buzzed really hard And blow that fuse and we were so confused Well, Williams actually had the ingenious idea, instead of doing the standard Gottlieb procedure of, if you want to change the machine to high tap, if your location has low line voltage and you want to add a little extra power to the coils, on a Gottlieb machine you have to clip the wire or desolder the wire off the transformer, polish the other transformer lug for high tap like perfectly, and then solder that coil wire onto the transformer. Coil power wire onto the high tap lug on the transformer. That's the way all Gottlieb games work forever. Very early vintages of Williams like my Silver Skates or El Paso from like the early 50s, they actually had a Jones plug in the head that you would just plug from one thing into another like you were changing a game from three to five balls. You just plug it into high tap. It was so easy. And then later Peter Finages, like my Gusher or Rocket, for example, they actually put that in the fuse holder. So there's two fuses for the light bulbs and for the backbox and the play field. And then there's two other fuse holders for low line or normal line. You're only meant to use one of those fuse holders. If you put both the fuses in, it'll try running both the lines at the same time and one of those fuses will blow. So we were looking at the schematics and we were like, oh, so that's just how to do high tap in this vintage. So if you put a fuse in the low line side, that's like telling the game it has low line voltage. That's using high tap. So you want to put the fuse in normal line on that vintage of game. That's just the standard coil power. That's like the only fuse holder you ever want to leave empty in pinball because that's just that's just how Williams did it back in the day. And it was, it's a great way of doing it. It's just, when that was my first time encountering it, you're just like, oh, this is different from everything else I've ever seen. What's wrong here? Yeah, when I watched your YouTube video, that was the first time that I had ever seen that. So I had made a note that you talked about there, there was a low line and a 50 volt 10 amp fuse in the middle. Yeah, I would suspect any Williams game from at least 1955 to 1961 to have that. Maybe a little later than 55, but another reason that Rocket and that exact vintage of Williams is so much freaking fun is because they used 50-volt coils in that game, which meant super powerful pop bumpers, super powerful flippers, and the flippers, they were red Metal flippers. And the metal flippers never wear out. Right. It's just, it's like a winning combination of features. It did suck though, if you ever have a fried flipper coil, my old Williams four star machine that I sold, the flipper coil fried so bad that it melted everything and charred the underside of the playfield. Like, it sucks if you ever have a fried coil and then you're trying to get the plunger The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. challenges for attitude you Man 1 – My 516's nut driver fits perfectly into pushing a coil sleeve out so I don't know what size the outside of the nut driver is but I know my 516's size fits perfectly in that so that might save you some time. Man 2 – Sometimes I get coils that are so bad that I just take my chisel and a hammer and I just hammer all the burnt crap away with my chisel until I've completely broken the plunger free because you almost have to You can buy as many new coils as you want and they'll come with the sleeve but they'll almost never come with the plunger so unless you find somewhere else to buy the coil plunger off of you really do have to re-use it. I know you have a large collection you're trying to buy a lot of new machines you mentioned to me but I'm curious if there are any particular pinball machines that you're still hunting for? Yeah, I, uh, which is really funny you mention that. I listened to all your podcast episodes as well. Um, the previous gentleman you had on the podcast right before me was, am I right in saying that he mentioned, uh, he had like a Williams Valiant machine? Yes. Yeah, so that was one machine I fixed for a gentleman in like, uh, Council Bluffs, which is just, uh, Omaha but Iowa version. I fixed that and seven or seven other machines for this gentleman over the course of like a week or two and uh this was the basement of his church that he was turning into a wedding venue and he wanted the pinball machine room to be the men's changing room they'd be getting their clothes off and playing pinball so i'm like yeah that's kind of funny whatever valiant was one of the machines that was there and my goodness i just fell in love with that game it doesn't suffer from this the godly I think that's the problem of being a multiplayer game where one person builds up a feature really far and then the other person collects it. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's not really a problem. That's kind of how they were made. Right. To be like, oh, someone else can just cash in all your hard work, but if you're looking for a truly competitive game, especially like a tournament game, Mm-hmm. We're going to be pretty hard to pass up, but on that Valiant, your scores go all the way back to, and all your advances go all the way back to zero every time you lose a ball, every time it switches between players. It's only a two player game, but I am such a sucker for medieval themes. Oh yeah, the art on there is great. I love the back glass on the Valiant. Yeah, I love the back glass on it. I also have a Bally Joust. Oh, okay. Yeah, it has that little bagatelle board in there. It's a two-player. But that one I paid $200 for and it was on no legs, on a gravel floor in the barn. Termites had eaten all the way halfway up through the coin door. It's disgusting. Oh, no. But yeah, I'm gonna need a donor cabinet for that one because I can't even attach the legs if I wanted to. There's no wood left. That's how bad it is. But other than that, yeah, no, I definitely would stick out for a Valiant. I could probably buy a Valiant in most conditions for even like a really bad condition for 800 bucks. I really want Valiant, but other than that, not many EMs I'm super wanting to buy. I like more 70s games, it's just, it's always hard for me to find them real cheap. I got a Gottlieb Marble Queen, finally. So it was a great deal as in I'm glad I have one, it was a bad deal as in how much I paid for it. Oh. But I don't know if you've seen Gottlieb's Marble Queen, but it's a 1953, it's kind John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I've got, like I said, I've got 126 machines. They are shoved into my two bedroom apartment and my storage unit, which is like 10 by 30. And even that's getting pretty darn full. So I am plenty to work on. I have, I have a lot of work that I actually just need to do instead of just slacking off and going on trips. Like half the reason I have all this work is because I'm spending half my time buying more stuff. I'm not even home. I'm just, oh, there's a machine for sale 12 hours away in Indiana. Let's go. I see that you can do in-home repairs or at your shop. Tell us about a typical repair that you do and where you draw the line at suggesting to bring a customer game back to your shop. Most of what I do is house calls. Back when I started, I was charging $85 an hour to do house calls. Sometimes I will still do that if I know it's just going to be a quick house call. But recently I've been upping my rates sometimes up to $95 an hour just because I don't get house calls too frequently. There's still another gentleman, the same gentleman who fixed my haunted house machine, The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I think this needs to get some more money from doing the house calls here. And hopefully when he's done with that, I'll have some of his business be sent my way, which would be real nice. But for now, yeah, it's just about $85, $95 an hour to do the house call. You know, $65 for every hour I'm driving away for gas because not only two hours of driving, That's two hours of me just sitting in a car being completely unproductive. So, might as well make a little more money for that cause people are like, oh, 65 for gas? Like, that's not actually how much that gas costs, what do you drive? I'm like, that's not the point, I'm now spending two hours that I could be spending working on my own games just sitting in my car. I can't do anything when I'm sitting there. So that's kind of their arguing for that. And for when I started doing the machine repairs, you say at my shop, it's not my shop. It's people bring them to me. I shove them into my two bedroom apartment and then I can't access the sink in my kitchen until I get that machine fixed because usually they end up in my kitchen. Gotcha. So yeah. Tight squeeze. No, it's horrible, but yeah, currently I have a gentleman's El Dorado machine in my living room that I was just working on before I came here. I have a gentleman's Hotline Williams EM in my grandparent's basement in Omaha that I was working on earlier. I was doing work on that at the same time as I'm working on my Triple Strike right next to it, which is nice. I've got two about the same vintage next to each other. Other than that, I also have a customer's Dungeons and Dragons that's been sitting next to the old one, the Bally one. Yeah. Sitting next to, uh, sitting in Mike's shop, Mike of Pinball Pass in Omaha. He, I, all of a sudden, I guess he just sold all of his machines. He had like 20 of them. Oh, wow. He sold everything, so I don't know if he had like a big health scare or something or other, but... Yeah, he, apparently the only thing left of it in his shop are the Dungeons and Dragons I had there John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. Essentially, I will do everything to that thing besides paint the cabinet. $700, I'm also providing the LEDs and rubbers, and the only way it's going to charge more than that is if I have to replace a fried coil. Then it's like $20, $25 per coil. Gotcha. And that's not even money I get, you know, that's just what you'd be having to pay for a coil anyways. Do you encounter people who are looking, you know, they didn't pay very much for the game, and they're, you know, they want you to do all this work for almost nothing? Almost nothing? Or, you know, very low cost? Very occasionally, yeah. It's really hard as well, people that have had the game, like, the worst calls I get are people that have had the game for 10, 15 years, and they, it's not worked the entire time, and it's probably never worked in their possession. And then they try to call in the pinball guy to fix their machine, and it's like, they just got it out of storage, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I was there five hours, totals like 400 some bucks, and they were like, well, it doesn't look like 400 bucks. I'm like, yeah, no, it still looks like a piece of crap. I'm not going to be able to sand the whole cabinet down and give you a paint job in four hours at your place with no ventilation. But it is pretty hard when people are just looking to sell. A lot of times I just am just flat out straight with them. I'm like, hey, if you want pinball repair because you want to make a profit while selling it, that's never going to happen in the history of ever. I had that happen once where a gentleman had a space shuttle machine in Lincoln, Nebraska, and he said, I want it fixed so I can sell it. And I'm like, okay, what is the fix? Because if I'm going to be there longer than an hour, you're going to be paying me more than 120 bucks. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Knapp Arcade, Bally Williams, Straight Down the Middle, Bally Williams, In that case, I will probably only be there an hour. Yeah, there's only so many things can be wrong with a flipper, right? Right. One of the hardest flipper fixes I've ever done. Of course. No, I get to it and I'm like, oh, okay, clean the end of stroke switch, clean the flipper switch, all those look fine. I've got power on all the coil lugs. I've got, yeah, the whole mechanism, it's not frozen. I push it, and like, but the flipper button just does not work on one side. Transistor isn't burned up on the board or anything, and I am just, I'm staring at it, and I'm like, what is wrong with this? I actually got to the point where I call Brian, the guy who fixed my haunted house that still does the repairs. I'm like, after I give him a call, I'm like, hey, I'm trying to chase down the schematics. I can't figure out why this flipper isn't working. And, and I had mentioned to him, I'm like, it kind of throws me back to this connector PJ6 or something. And he's like, well, that's not a connector on the board. That's one of those intermittent connectors where those big box connectors, the big molex boxes that you pull apart if you want to actually take the whole playfield out. That's one of those connectors. And I like yeah that what I was looking at too but I didn look at any of the boxes too close I ended up looking at those box connectors The batteries on the System 9 CPU board had leaked so bad they dripped down about an entire foot straight onto these box connectors Oh, wow. And they completely corroded all, like, 40 pins. Oof. All the way through. One of these pins ended up being the flipper power for the right one. So I took the wire for the flipper power off both ends of the box connector, twisted it together, soldered it together, and I just told the guy, hey, whoever you sell this to, let them know that they need to replace this connector and let them know that they won't be able to take the head off without cutting this wire because I've soldered it. I've overridden the connector so you've got flipper power. I didn't have that connector with me, and even if I did, I was going to be there for hours repinning because that's That's 40 times 2. It's a box. That's 80 pins. So I'm like, I'm gonna be there for a couple hours doing that. And I'm like, yeah, no, just whoever's buying this, no. And he's like, okay. Paid me like 120 bucks or so. I was on my way. About a month and a half later, I get a phone call from a gentleman. He's like, hey, I bought this pinball machine in Lincoln a while back. I was wondering how much it costs for you to put a new play field in. And I'm like, that's not really a thing I do. I can't do that on a house call. Like, that's not... He's like, yeah, there's a little bit of wear on the field and I just didn't know if that was an option. I at least want to get it upgraded to LEDs and whatnot. And I'm like, well, what machine is it? He's like, oh, it's a space shuttle. It looks pretty beat up. And he sends me a picture of it. I'm like, it's got the exact same wear that that space shuttle that I had with the box connector. I'm like, oh, great. So I'm like, I told him, I'm like, I tell you what, this thing is going to need about two and a half hours of service just for me to replace this connector before I can even start tearing down the whole playfield to put LEDs in it. So I ended up doing that for him. And at the end of the day, like after all the work, I mean, the machine looks great. Replace that whole box, got all the coils properly firing because the bumpers didn't work. Got everything properly firing, got all the LEDs in it, boom. And then just over like probably or just under probably a thousand bucks for the multiple days I was there is what I got paid. And then to add insult to injury, my buddy in Omaha, Joe Cole, he is actually a magician and he does pretty professional like restoration work in his house. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I wish the guy that was selling it to you would have been more honest about all the acid damage like I told him to be, but whatever. Yeah, oh boy. You get screwed sometimes. Like, the worst I ever got screwed was when I bought a Bromley's Little Pro. You ever heard of that? No. It's a game by Bromley which made like redemption games back in the day and they used the old golfing guy mechanism from like the EM like golfer games where like there's a little fat dude and he swings a putter. Have you seen the EM golfers like pass golf and stuff? Yes. Yeah, so they reused that mechanism and they made it mini golf themed. Oh, okay. And they called it Little Pro. I bought it for $3,500 in Lake Wacomas, Missouri. And I sold it. It broke within a week of me having it. I couldn't figure out how to fix it because it already had hacks with relays that were added and such. It wasn't even anywhere close to factory. And then I sold it to a guy that had it shipped to New York for $2,000. I took a $1,500 loss on it. It was terrible. That's probably the worst deal I've ever had, but... It's a cute game. I looked it up. I like the art on it. Yeah, it's cute, but even when it did work, it really is a redemption game at heart. You... there's no scoring to it. It's just... you can do the nine holes, and then if you do all nine holes, it's like you score the jackpot, you get a bunch of tickets. You know, at least with the really old electromechanical golf games, you've got scoring for hitting different targets, and you can go for a high score. In golf, I suppose, probably a low score, but at least when I bought that little pro from that gentleman in Missouri, he also sold me my Paul Boyzell's 52. I bought that from him for $550, and he was like, I don't really want to sell this, but I do want to sell it. He was going back and forth. I'm like, hey, can you give me $50 off of it if I beat you in it? And then I beat him playing the game and then he still didn't want to sell it. So I'm like, okay, don't worry about the 50 bucks off. Can I just take it for 550? He's like, okay. And I was, I literally had to tell him, I really want this. So if you ever want it back, just let me know and I'll give it back to you for what I paid for it. And he's like, okay. And thankfully he's never contacted me again because I took a $2,000, I took a $1,500 loss On the other thing, he sold me because it broke immediately. I didn't tell him it broke immediately. But I was like, oh, like, if this guy ever wants this other thing back from me, I'm gonna have to break it to him that, hey, your other thing was way overpriced and I'm gonna need a lot more for it. But yeah, have you ever seen, it's somewhere on my Instagram, it's Paul Boisels The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Scott Danesi. I think I found it. It looks like it's tiered. Oh yeah, the harder you shoot the ramp, the further the ball will jump into those holes. It looks like there are four rows of holes. Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, you're trying to make hands anywhere from high card to the royal flush. And it's just betting. You'd be betting against your opponent. But it's so much fun to play this with other people. It really is. And people really do enjoy it when they stop by. That's one of those things where it's like, even my mother was still with me, she's like, don't ever sell that one. I'll put it in my house if I have to. That thing is so cool. And she won't say that about that much, so that's pretty cool. There are a lot of unique EM games out there that are not pinball. Yeah, I have a ball bowler buried somewhere. I have a couple old EM slots that are really cool. I'm really looking forward to fixing one of them. I got, that's one of the coolest stories as well, I got this machine, Keeney's Deluxe 3-way Super Bell. It's a slot machine where you pay nickels, dimes, or quarters, and it pays you nickels, dimes, or quarters when you win. But I drove all the way to Milwaukee, Wisconsin for this one and a Universal's feature bell slot machine as well. And the gentleman selling it was none other than the nephew of Mad Dog Dave Christensen, which was the Bally backglass artist that did like Twin Win and Fireball, I believe. Dave, you know, he did Matt Ahari, all of that style of backglass art, that was all they had on Dave. I saw this listing for these slot machines and they kept going down and down in price. I'm like, when they finally both hit 200 bucks, I'm like, okay, I'm going to get them. So, it was 200 bucks each and the gentleman who was like, oh yeah, my uncle just passed away, he was a designer for Bally Pinball back in the day. He didn't actually mean designer, he meant artist. He had like five slot machines, but he also had an old Bally one ball horse racer, a couple other upright electronic slots, and this bust of this lady that he painted to make it look like she was coming out of the canvas. It was really freaky. And he had the thing under a sheet like it was like some ghost or something. But it was really interesting. He was like my uncle Dave. Yeah, he was he was never into the internet or anything and he had basically no there was no social media presence or anything for this guy. He just attended Expo a couple times in like the early 2000s, 20-10s, to do some autographs on the old Bally backglass artwork and nothing else. But I also have a couple of images that I was meaning to upload onto Instagram of this guy, his nephew. Not only did he get all his stuff, but there is a bunch of old bally prototype artwork Oh wow. that has never seen the light of day for machines that they never even ended up making. This prototype cabinet and back glass artwork that are sketched directly onto pieces of paper with what look like colored pencils. And it's so professional. It's so well done. Man, these pinball collectors probably go kind of crazy for this. Oh, yeah. You might have some money on your hands here. Could be. But yeah. Sadly, a lot of the companies ended up throwing away a lot of stuff like that back in the day. Yeah. It was cool to see all that. I mean, he definitely...he also had a...there is a book that they made about it called Bad Dog and His Art. Oh. I mean, he had his own copy of his own book. And the front of the first page, he has Gene Cunningham's signature on it. And I think I leave that to the guy who tried doing the Big Bang Bar remakes, eventually. Remade that machine. So yeah, no, it was a great, great time, at least getting those machines. I'm really looking forward to fixing those slot machines. They are heavy, though. That's the heaviest thing for a bot. And of course my ball bowler. They're probably the biggest pains in the ass to move. On your YouTube channel, I watched your video where you went through the United's Kickapoo. Oh yeah, uh-huh. That was really interesting. I don't know that I've ever seen a Kickapoo before, but I've certainly seen games like that. But that was interesting. This is a electromechanical game. It's kind of like a skeeball kind of thing, but there's a puck instead of a ball. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The exact same game as Kickapoo where you slide the puck forward and there's a bunch of holes it lands in. But above that in the back they have a man running unit and it's baseball. And hitting the puck in the center rewards a home run and you can play up to six players and it's baseball themed. Oh wow. It's like a pitch and bat game but with a puck and that one is pretty cool. That sounds fun. Yeah, I know, I saw that Kickapoo get listed when I bought my Gottlieb Northstar from a gentleman in St. Louis named BJ Cunningham. Great guy. He has got some crazy stuff, but he had a ball bowler, he had a Kickapoo machine that was fully restored, and I played it. That was the first time I ever saw one. I'm like, yeah, I'll keep my eye out for one of these. This thing looks cool as heck. And then, not even like two, three weeks later, Facebook Marketplace, down in Wichita, Kansas, three hours away, a Kickapoo machine, completely disassembled and sitting on gravel in a shed, mind you, for 50 bucks. And I'm like, oh my goodness gracious, okay, I'm going right there. Messaged the guy, went and picked it up, and of course you've got mouse nests and all this nasty crap in there, and I'm sneezing on the way out because I'm allergic to everything. But the guy was like, yeah, I don't even know the story behind this. I just bought this house a year ago and this has been in the shed ever since I bought this house. Oh, wow. The old guy was a massive Craigslist hoarder is what he said. So, he didn't even know the story behind it, but got it fully fixed up to the point where it looks like what it did in that video. Yeah. And, no, it's fun. It's cool to play the different game modes with Advance and Flash and stuff like that. They made some cool stuff back in the day. The only issue is I kind of want to put it on location, but not only if I were to do that, I have to get the belts returning the puck very consistent. I probably need a new belt for the pulley system for the conveyor belt because it doesn't return the puck 100% of the time, and I can't afford even one mess up if it, you know, is on location. But also, that thing's so old, I can't put it on something more than 25 cents. I need to modify the existing hardware, increase the coins per play. I did that with my crane machine. I just put a vintage Oasis that they could only be set to like 75 cents per play or 50 cents per play. So I added an old Gottlieb two coins per play like AS style relay. Oh. I added that to the bulb voltage. Essentially, I had the coil hooked up to the front door 12 volts light bulb voltage, and then every time the coil would pass through the micro switch, it would pulse the little relay coil, and that would change the two coins per play relay to the next position. And since there's no harm in having those switches, you know, constantly closed because it's a digital game, I had the coin switch hooked up to the little switch that's on top of the AX relay, had it set to 50 cents per play so every other coin would pulse that switch, therefore making it a dollar. That was a good deal too because especially on that crane machine, it's one of those old I'm a fan of the old candy style cranes where it's play until you win. Oh, okay. And I have it filled with a bunch of tiny little rubber ducks. And even my mom was like, why do you expect people to pay a dollar per play? I'm like, well, I both have to because they're always winning. And these ducks themselves are probably about 56 cents, 60 cents, even if I buy them in bulk. So... Gotcha. Yeah. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I've got a bunch of stuff to fix. I've recently gotten more pre-war machines as well from the early 30s. Oh, okay. I've got my Clark Dudley & Co.'s Live Power was my first one. I still have yet to fix that one. I just got a Bally Signal machine. It was down in Wichita on my way down to Texas Pinball Festival. I bought the Bally Signal machine. It's a pre-war from like mid-30s. Mm-hmm. And I set it up at Texas Pinball Festival in the pre-war exhibit. Not only got my pass for bringing a machine, but it also got like third best in show for the whole thing. Oh wow. Congratulations, that's great. And I'm like, I just bought the thing on my way here. I was like, come on now. Were these mechanical games or are they electromechanical? Oh, my Bally Signal actually has electronics in it. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The pinball game was actually designed by Harry Williams. Oh, okay. Nice. I've probably seen it in one of the pinball books. Yeah. No, there's actually a whole video of a gentleman that is playing a bally signal that is fully recorded and working on YouTube. So, I mean, he does a really good job explaining the rules, but... I got that one, and on the way back from Texas Pinball Festival, another one was listed for a hundred bucks. Oh, wow. And it just looked disgusting. Like, I couldn't even make out the machine. I couldn't even make out what it was. There was no legs, no back end of the machine. And I'm looking at it, I'm like, this looks like something that would actually be fun. It looks like there's two light bulbs on the field. It looks pretty well designed. I wonder who made this. I took the listing picture, I Google image searched it. It was actually a Gottlieb turntable from the 30s. Once again, another electronic machine that had starter holes that would turn the table left and right To advance the balls to higher scoring and kicker lanes and I'm like, oh yeah, this is a Gottlieb machine? Heck yeah. Yeah, I went and grabbed that but it is so disgusting and so nasty looking like I'd be lucky to keep that thing under a grand after doing a full restore job on it. I did also want to mention my very first EM that I ever bought. I mentioned it was a Gottlieb high hand. I ended up selling that as well pretty early on because I'm just not a big fan of high hand. I think it's a pretty boring game. I ended up eventually buying a Gottlieb Captain card, which is the Adaball version. The game is so much more fun than high hand. I went and bought it off a super nice gentleman I met down in Oklahoma for like 600 some bucks or so and he actually told me he attends Texas Pinball Festival every year. This is the gentleman who I was on that Twitch stream with the Hanger Pinball down in Texas Pinball Festival. They do Hanger Pinball and it's like a local pinball scene in Oklahoma. So that was his Captain Card machine that I bought from him, restored, and then brought back down to Texas. I brought Captain Card and Funhaus down to Texas the first time I went. And I got to bring his machine essentially back to him and at least let him play it when it was working, because he couldn't figure out why it was broken. So that was super nice to be able to do. And the rule set on Captain Card is so much better than the one on high hand. It's just, it's laughable almost. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. Three more balls, I was just shooting rubber. Because there's nothing left on the whole machine. You've got the center pop bumper and then the center kick out hole, which you can't really shoot for. It's kind of in the middle of nowhere. You just kind of have to either lob it up there or get lucky for a replay. Whereas Captain Card, when you drop all the targets on Captain Card, you're immediately awarded an extra ball. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm shocked that they made that machine two different ways because a lot of times your replay versions are better than your add-a-ball versions. But I'm shocked they did such a poor job on the replay compared to the add-a-ball. I prefer the add-a-ball to me because if you're owning it at home it makes sense to have the add-a-ball because winning a free game is okay. Well, winning a free ball is much more fun because it elongates the game and you feel more rewarded. Yeah, at home it's great. I also prefer the replay game in most instances because I also keep it in mind Oh, I want to have a pinball museum pinball arcade eventually like I've got those 20 machines at the Oasis. In that environment Yeah, winning a free game does mean something and I hear people clapping or like being like hell Yeah, when I hear the match go off. So yeah, I just scroll through my list of all my crud I just remember I own a Gottlieb Fun Park as well. That's another game where I don't see myself ever owning a fun land because the out of ball just has so much more going for it than fun land. Fun Park is also pretty difficult to understand. It took my buddy Alex, my good friend who used to help me set up a lot of my machines, it took him like probably a dozen games for him to actually get his head wrapped around the rule set on that thing because it is pretty complex. The long story short of it is just your upper lanes light 1 through 4, your target light 5 through 8, and then your upper rollover button lights 9 and 10. And you need to both have the selection as the color that you are hoping to spin, and then you spin the spinners. It's so difficult to explain. Play, but when you spin the spinners, it's only looking for a color that you have selected, and that changes off the center bumper. So if you only have green selected, when you spin the spinners, you're only able to score one of the green numbers, which are one through four. And if it lands on one through, if it lands on a green number, you score 500 points. If it lands on a yellow number, you score an extra ball and it resets all the numbers. Or if you score the red number, which is 9 and 10, gotten off that rollover button, it scored a double extra ball and then resets all the targets. So you get two and one. I have a whole video of Alex playing that at the very end of my, uh, one of my Instagram videos. I'm like, oh, don't go out the side. And then he, he rolls down one spinner just to move the arrow one position and that immediately awards him two extra balls and he can keep playing it. That game is something else. I want to talk about your YouTube channel a little bit. You have some great videos, and that's how I first discovered you. Your first video is a pinball video about the Gusher pinball machines. One thing I like about your videos is you play through the game, at least once, in many cases a few times, to give viewers a sense of the gameplay. I'm always impressed at how how well you play as you talk. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I've been thinking about these things and even if there are a video on them, it's in like 240p and they're just like five seconds of gameplay and I'm like, there's nothing documented anywhere halfway decent for these. And I ended up coming up with a formula like, I know exactly what a pinball repair person is going to be looking for when they're on YouTube, so now I've gotten to the point where I start my videos out just with gameplay. I play the gameplay first so people can see, you know, how it's supposed to function, how strong things are supposed to be when you've actually cleaned everything properly. And then I take the glass off and I also go through all the very specific scoring that each each machine has. And, you know, because there's a lot of people will be like, oh, well, when I hit this bumper, is it supposed to add this many points or this many points? And I just want to have a very easily comprehensible, easy to digest video of this is everything that can happen on the playfield of the machine. If your machine isn't doing this specific thing, that's not correct. I then go into that and then I'll open up the machine and I'll be like, here's some machine specific stuff of, oh yeah, this is my Bally mini zag. And this is how the Bally is different from a Williams or a Gottlieb. And I do kind of like to leave some older fixes as, you know, Instagram posts or I have a whole minute and a half long video of that Bally Mini-Zag machine that isn't in my YouTube video where I show the power cord for the machine when I bought it. The Power Cord Came Out of the Transformer And it went into like this on switch that was covered in electrical tape And like the wires were splinting out of it And then it went into another cord that then went into another cord that had the plug on it It was three separate cords plus an on-off switch, spliced together, just covered in electrical tape for the power of the machine. I've seen some funny stuff like you mentioned that Gusher had a cigarette butt around the tilt rods so it couldn't actually hit the ring. That was the first I've ever seen of that. I'm like, oh that's easily removable and pretty cool. Uniquely creative. Yeah, some of them were bad ones where like my Jungle Princess had the nuts on the inside of all the leg bolts and all the bolts and brackets were stripped when I took it out. So I had to buy eight new leg bolts and four new leg brackets and those brackets sucked and I hate doing those. That's a lot of work for brackets. Yeah, the only other thing I wanted to mention maybe is like for reserve, for example, that even though it's like a 1971 Williams, it's still in the vintage, or right, 1961 Williams. It's still in the vintage of having 50 volt coils. So, you know, there was like three We will talk about your favorite pinball teams, memberailed teams, Get Together, Best New homes,ным cars, Dream Packers, O'Neill, Star Cools, SureYetim, Way Halo, Shadow Coils, enemies, films TenS, Discovery Life, The One decent cave bullet, Annyeong the products, forget Bones added, Esper condago, I'm a fan of the Pulse because both the 50-point score reel coil I use for the 10-point score reel and then the 10-point bell coil that was constantly going off, those two had not enough resistance and all the current was wanting to go through those coils instead of the 100-point score reel coil which was factory. So, I did end up finally, when I put reserve on location in vintage Oasis, I did end up having to order two of those, you know, actually proper resistance coils. You can always go down in resistance, it's super easy. I just did this the other day. I went and I finished up this lady's triple action Williams machine on a house call. And for that machine, I, she needed a new score reel coil because her 10 digit had completely fried. I went over to my storage unit, I grabbed my Bally boomerang parts head that just had the cabinet and backbox, no playfield. I grabbed the score reel coil out of that because I'm like, it looks about the same, you know, it's the exact same score reel assembly as the Williams one. Put the coil in and it's not moving at all. I tested the ohm and it's like, oh, the Williams coil's at 7 ohms, the Bally coil's at 29 ohms. The more ohms you have, the more resistance you have, the weaker the coil actually is. So, like, 29 ohms sounds good. I clip off one of the coil wires and then I unwrap the thing almost a thousand times or so. And then I burnished the wire, solder it back to the lug, and I remeasure the coil, and now my coil's sitting at 14 ohms. Still not as low as 7, but at this point I still put it back in the machine, tested it out, and what do you know? It works. Yeah, I mean, if you're able to get away with a little more resistance, if anything, that's actually a little better to prevent coils from frying if they ever lock on in the future, John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. It doesn't matter if it's a little above or a little below resistance. If it can do its job, then just let it be. Yeah, I gotta try to look at some of my other YouTube videos. It's pretty standard. I do miss a lot of uploads too because I fix a lot of machines, but I don't record for them because a lot of times my phone just doesn't have any freaking space left. I have like 30,000 images on my camera roll. They're mostly memes because I'm 24. No, it's pretty bad. It's like, I could film a bunch of videos off of the machines that I have at Vintage Oasis. Just go down the line one by one and get videos out for them. But the main ones I really want to do are, for example, like my Williams Rocket. Did I upload a video for that? I did not. I don't see one because when you were talking about it earlier, I didn't remember seeing the Rocket video. I'm going to take a video. Because I was going to take a video for that, but then it's actually sitting at a buddy of mine. He has a bunch of 3D printers and he has a Godzilla pinball machine, but he's also rented some pinball machines from me in the past and he's had my Rocket for about a year, just you know, my standard EM, 30 bucks a month. People can have it in their house or whatever. That's a good deal. It's just, he's been having it in his house and he's really enjoyed it, so I'll probably I'm going to get it back from him sometime soon, but I also don't know what I want to do with the wood rails because I've got all my wood rails in Vintage Oasis a nickel for five ball game. And some of my earlier wood rails, I'm regretting it now. Some of my earlier wood rails, like silver skates and pinwheel, I actually like burnished the crap out of it. Like the, uh, they have this weird coin mechanism in it where it's before the standard coin mechanism, but it's after the nickels slide where you put the nickels sideways and then slide it in. It's that weird middle vintage. You've got that in Silver Skates, Marble Queen, that early fifties vintage where all it is is you put a nickel in and it sort of leans to the side and rolls forward. Oh, okay. And if it's small enough to lean to the side, it'll be a penny, because that's the only way you can really cheat that game or put wrong change in it. The slot was wide enough for a nickel. If you put a penny or a dime in it, it would lean to the side even further and then slide down and return. If it was big enough to be a nickel, it would catch on something that caught the top end of the nickel, go all the way in and hit the start switch. When I was initially putting the wood rails on location, I was like, I'm never going to be able to charge like a nickel for these things. So I burnished the crud out of the inside and outside of those old mechanisms to the point where I essentially forced it to take quarters and reject nickels. Oh, okay. Like, I made the slot wider and I made the inside of it taller so where quarters would slide through, but then nickels would get rejected. It worked on Silver Skates and Pinwheel. It worked really well. But now I'm looking at it and I'm like, oh, I modified the original hardware in a way that I can't undo. And now I have all those machines at Vintage Oasis that are wood rails that all my wood rails there take nickels. So I can't put any of these two modified games in Vintage Oasis and just say, hey, these specific ones, they take a quarter because people are going to put the wrong change in them and jam them. You need to have everything be individually labeled very specific what change it takes. Otherwise people are going to be putting whatever in those machines. I have fixed so many coin jams, it's not funny. Oh, I imagine that's a challenge. Oh yeah. I don't even let the coins return on some of them. Like, for example, I put Flipper Fair on location, and Flipper Fair has the worst vintage of coin return in any game ever. It's the one where, if the coin is wrong, it comes back out through the front of the cabinet, hits a weird, like, semi-circle, and then moves to the left, and then you can pick it up. It's actually physically there on the front of the machine, which is kind of a cool way. It looks nice and it's very obvious when you have a returned coin. But the problem with it is it's such a, like, it doesn't matter if you take the whole mechanism out and clean the ramp and clean the inside of the circle. The thing is just so poorly made that especially small coins like a dime, the dime does not We have enough momentum to make that turn and actually present itself. So once you have one coin, whether it's a dime or a penny, that doesn't make that turn to where somebody can see it, then every other future reject after it gets stuck on that coin and then eventually fills up the entire coin mech and then fills up the entire coin chute down to the mech. It is just a mess to the point where on like flipper fare, I just take the whole return shoot off and I leave it inside the machine when I have it on location because I would much rather somebody put like a dime in the machine and it fall inside the machine, not in the coin box and never jam the machine and just pile up in there instead of give them their dime back and then potentially eventually jam the machine. Even if people are paying quarters, all it takes is for enough rejects to get jammed to where it hits the bottom of the mech. And then, it doesn't matter if you're putting a quarter in there or not, the quarter's gonna land on the other coin, and then all of it's gonna fill up. It's like, you kind of have to walk a balance between letting people actually reject the coins as well, because sometimes, especially on locations, You might want to take out, like, let's say the newer games like Whirlwind or Indiana Jones. They've got the big, like, orange push to reject, you know, thing. You push into the thing and that moves the reject mechanism on the coin neck. A lot of times those aren't really terribly well designed to the point where you can actually get them stuck inside. Oh, I've experienced that even back in the day when those were new. So, that's what happened. Yeah, they get them stuck on the inside and then that either leads to one or two things. Either the coin mechanism is always going to reject because the reject is open, or it's stuck inside because it flew past the reject lever and then the mechanism works until the whole thing fills up because nobody has the ability to reject it. So a lot of times I'll leave the fronts on there for like cosmetic purposes, but I'll actually take out the armature that does reject the coins because just giving people the ability to push that in, they don't even know where the start button on these things is. It doesn't matter. I've literally had to help somebody back when I was working at the old shop. They were playing the Elvira and the Party Monsters. They put like a dollar in and it's only 50 cents to play and they didn't know what to do. They said, oh, the machine ain't my quarter. And I'm like, oh, you see this red button on the front? It says start. You can press that and then the ball comes out. Wow! I'm not actually that mean when I'm talking to people, but it's like, holy heck, I get it. And don't get me wrong, I get the old electromechanical games I have a lot of old ones there that have the ball lift. I get that. I get people not knowing they need to push this lever in to lift the ball up and then shoot the plunger. I fully understand that. I don't understand... I watched a guy once put a quarter into the Diamond Jack machine, which is the Adaball version of King of Diamonds. I watched this guy as I was fixing machines at that old place. Put a quarter into diamond jack, and every time you put a coin into an add-a-ball machine, it actually fully counts the ball counter down all the way, and then counts it back up to five. So he put a coin in, score wheels reset, counts down to zero, counts up to five, and that's the vintage where the ball actually comes to the plunger. Right. It came to the plunger, and he looked at it for another five seconds. He put another coin in, it counted down to zero, back up to five, the ball's still sitting in the plunger. He put another coin in, down to zero, up to five, ball's still sitting in the plunger, and then he did a fourth one, same procedure, and then he shot the ball. I don't know if he was just feeling generous or what, but I've seen... He finally saw the ball, maybe? Yeah, no, I've seen some interesting, unexplainable phenomena when it comes to people trying to operate a pinball machine. So, I mean, you think with two buttons on the side and one thing that pulls back with the spring, it'd be a little more self-explanatory, but, you know, maybe it's part of the fun of actually knowing how things work. Maybe it's just more of a power trip for me to be like, I'm like, oh, these people not knowing how pinball works, whereas I eat, sleep, and breathe pinball, and that's my whole entire life. Yeah, how could they not understand? Yeah, maybe I'm just on my own little power trip. I think what I'll do is wrap it up. So what I'm going to do is give you the opportunity to talk about how people can get in touch with you. Yeah, I've got my my social media is essentially everything is pribspinballrepair. I've got pribspinballrepair at gmail.com, pribspinballrepair as Instagram and Facebook. The only thing that isn't exactly that is my pin side, which I don't go on terribly much, but that in itself is pribpinrepair. And the reason for that is there was a character limit. I couldn't actually spell out all of pinball when creating my username, so. Pinside is Pribs Pin Repair and I also have my own website of pribspinballrepair.com as well as my YouTube like Mr. David mentioned. But the website, I'm hoping to have a little more traffic there and maybe update it a little since I first made it because I just repaid for the domain for it for like another $250 or something just to have the website domain for another year. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. The more frequently it'll come up in everyone's search. So, I've almost debated some nights just opening my phone and clicking my website and refreshing it for about an hour just to try and boost my relevancy. But, yeah, that always helps. But, you know, I'm not a big enough YouTuber to start a Patreon or even really provide any services worth donating to. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I've watched those, they're awesome. As soon as I watched those like two years ago, I immediately tried reaching out to the guy who made them. And I ended up talking to him, I found his like Twitter or whatever, and now I have his number and his Snapchat or whatever. But yeah, he's a super nice guy. He lives up in Minnesota. Oh, no, no, no. He lives up in Michigan. Michigan. Okay. Yeah, he's in Michigan. And if you guys get the chance, you can look up Bralix, which is B-R-A-L-I-X, and check Check out some of his videos. He has a whole channel dedicated to pinball now. And separately, I also bought my Paragon machine recently from a gentleman up in Minnesota. And when I bought the Paragon machine from him, it was listed for $900. The thing's a total basket case. There's no paint left on the playfield and there's no paint left on the back glass. But when I bought it from him, I'm like, hey, can you take off 50 bucks if I install the Rudy mod in your Funhaus machine? And I bought, I brought one of my custom mods that makes Rudy's eyes light up when you hit him in the face and make his mouth glow when he's asleep. I installed that for him about half an hour and he really, really enjoyed it, which was really nice. But as I thought that was out... If you click shop on your website, there's the light up Rudy mod available. I was going to sell those on the internet, but I've only ever had one person ever be interested in buying one of those off of me, and it was over fees. So I didn't really want to deal with shipping at that point, but I think it's more relevancy and more traction. I'd be more than happy to actually start mass producing them and selling them. I actually had a boatload of them printed with my buddy's 3D printer. But, um, yeah, I installed that Rudy mod for him, got the Paragon for $850, and he actually also has a separate YouTube channel called Rolling Retro. It really hit the pinball scene when he made a video on the Five Nights at Freddy's pinball machine on YouTube. Like, that one hit the algorithm and got, like, tens of thousands of views. I went back up to him recently, I posted this on Instagram, I believe. John Popadiuk, Bob Betor, Keith Elwin, Laser Los, Bowen Kerins, Lyman F. Sheats Jr.., orbit ramps, Automated Amusements, Python Anghelo, Joe Kaminkow, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. I'm like, okay, I'll bring you the James Bond because I want to get this whole crap in. So, no, no, this gentleman, he's also a really young guy up in Minnesota. He's got, you know, Funhaus, Elektra, Data East, Batman. He's got a lot of cool machines and like I said, the two YouTuber guys I know are Rolling Retro and Bralix and the Rolling Retro guy I also follow on Instagram as well. He has the whole video of me taking the James Bond out of this guy's mansion and I'm just like struggling trying to walk it up the side of this guy's house on the dolly because I didn't want to push it up his stairs and damage his stairs. So I'm just like pushing it up the hill trying to get it to my van. That machine is in a fairly nice condition too. Best, most mint system 80 I've ever seen. Oh wow. I have a question about Rolling Retro. What's the guy's name? Do you know? Dylan. Dylan Andrews. Okay. So I'm in my hand. I'm holding a book that he illustrated. Yeah, he did the illustration for the Pinball Scientists. The Pinball Kids book. Yeah. I actually am a customer of Ryan Tanner Walters who wrote the book. Yeah, I've talked to Ryan Tanner Walters a lot on the internet and I've seen him at the two Pinball Expos. Oh, nice. Yeah, Ryan Tanner Walters is very nice too, but he's also up in Minnesota. The Valley Company, Subsidiary of Walter Kidde & Co., Inc., Mirco Playfields, Tim Tim Kitzrow, Scott Danesi. Thank you for coming on my podcast. It's a pleasure to have you. Definitely. Yeah. Hope you're able to stop by sometime and play all my EMs. They're definitely not getting any younger at this rate. Holy cow. I'd like that. My wife and I like the idea of doing some road trips and there are some friends of ours that are on a road trip right now. They are, last I looked on Facebook, they were in Montana and they were headed for Colorado. I'm not sure which way they're coming back through, but at some point my wife and I want to do a road trip and sort We'll look forward to making my way through Nebraska. Yeah, definitely. It is also a little crazy to think that, like, starting in the next decade now, that Bally signal, my pre-war from 35, will be a century old. That's something. Like, holy cow. Your museum might have ten decades of pinball machines. I'm really hoping to. Did you see my video on the Bagatelle table on my YouTube channel? Did I not upload that? I don't think you did. I actually brought that to Pinball Expo, the 40th anniversary Pinball Expo. The Bagatelle table. No, no, oh my gosh, I didn't upload it. That's wild. Okay, I had that video on my phone. I'll upload that either tonight or tomorrow. I saw this Bagatelle table from the 1800s. It got listed down in Dallas, Texas for a whopping like $2,500. I'm like, this thing's expensive as heck, but it's like a full table. You, it's mahogany and it's sitting on slate and you fold out the top of the table and pull out the legs and it's a full-sized bagatelle where the holes are on the end. It has the original ivory balls for it and it even has original paperwork for the thing, not only for the rules, but how it was authenticated in the, in Robert Englunds, the Queen of Sussex oruellement têm, amid sistem I'm a single kid thinks about stealing a ball and putting a ball in his pocket. It'll be cool for the museum eventually, but it's stuff like that. And then like the 52 machine where there are balls that specifically go to it and you can't find anywhere. It's like those specific sections I might need to have some kind of either security or some kind of like admittance where people like pay an entry fee and then get to be in And they're like a private party or something because those are machines where it's like I want to show them off, I want people to enjoy them, but they are such relics and such artifacts that oh people are gonna scrape the crap out of them and destroy all the value. So I gotta kind of do a balance of keeping them looking presentable but also I want people to play everything that I have. I want people to experience things. I'm not the type of guy to be like, oh, let me fully restore this machine top to bottom and powder coat the legs and repaint the cabinet and add mods and then like have you look at it at Expo. I'm going to bring you a machine just for you to stare at it. And if you really want to play it, then I can come over and add a credit onto there and you can play it. I'm not one of those guys. There's a, I mean, granted they do great restoration work. There, anyone that attends Pinball Expo knows exactly the group I'm talking about. I've seen them on videos. They are phenomenal. They've got, like, the last pinball expo they had, like, the Radical and the Addams Family. I saw the Addams Family one. That was impressive. They're also the one who does the Getaway, the Getaway that's there. And don't get me wrong, they're the most high-end restorations of all time you could ever get. However, I'm of the firm belief that it doesn't matter how fancy I could possibly ever restore a pinball machine, I want them to be played. They're meant to be played in my eyes. Like, they're not like a collector's car to just sit in a garage for people to like gawk at and never be driven. You know, you gotta play the things, even if you make it look really nice. I had two cents on the restoration issue. I'll never have something where I'm like, no, don't touch this thing. I care about it so much. This has so much value. I paid so much. It's like I paid almost eight grand for Indiana Jones, yet I plan on putting that thing at Vintage Oasis here in the next couple of months. Oh, okay. So gotta let people have fun. Yeah. I thank you so much for doing this. We'll look forward to keeping in touch and we'll do a rocket episode and an ice review if you're up for it. Yep, sounds good. Excellent. Thank you. And that concludes today's episode. I want to thank you for joining me on the EMPinball Journeys Pinball Podcast. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. Please look out for upcoming interviews. If you want to contact me, I can be reached at EMPinballJourneysPodcast at gmail.com. You can also follow me on Facebook or Instagram at Adirondack Pinball. Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, corrections, or suggestions of future EM pinball topics. I'd love to hear about your journey so far. Thanks again for listening. We'll be back again.