eBay Impulse Buy? Willliams Love Bug Caveat Emptor?

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This is a story about an impulse buy off eBay for a pinball machine. It perhaps may be a cautionary tale of how sellers can hide the true condition of a machine. This also explains why it’s important to really “low ball” unknown sellers of games. There’s a very good chance what you see and what you get are two different things… here is my story of an eBay purchase of a Williams Love Bug (the add-a-ball version of Williams Doodle Bug).

“Hey Professor!” First Look: Gilligan’s Island

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Here’s the first of another multi-part series of stories on some recent game pick ups.   Come look with me as I discover new pinball machines in the wild and take them back to the lair to examine and restore! This was from a lot of about five games I picked up from a company that was going out of business. This was the main game I wanted but I had to get the entire package. Boo hoo. 😉

Behind the scenes: How much work goes into making the arcade games you enjoy playable?

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It’s not easy maintaining a collection of games – there are always things to repair…. I thought I might take a quick walk through our arcade space and discuss what I usually do after a party and what happens to the machines and what needs to be done to the games to get them working for the next event. Some machines hold up; some break down. Take a walk with me and see what work needs to be done?

When a broken switch isn’t a broken switch?

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Sometimes what you think is wrong isn’t what’s really wrong. This is why our eyes and our mind are the best tools we can use to repair machines. In this video, I take a look at what appears to be a broken switch in the shooter lane of a Data East Guns and Roses pinball machine. The switch appears to be flaky and intermittent and manual testing of the switch seems to indicate that it won’t work properly and needs to be replaced, but all is not as it seems…

Making a pinball board test rig using a PC power supply

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Here’s a quick video that shows how to take an old PC power supply you may have laying around and use it to power up pinball boards for testing. I use the Bally-35 MPU board as an example of how we can set this up to do board work on the MPU while it’s outside of the actual pinball machine. This is great for testing things while you’re refurbishing a board that’s been giving you problems.

First Look: 1968 Gottlieb Target Pool – looking over a new game before turning it on

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This is a first look at a 1968 Gottlieb wedgehead electro-mechanical pinball machine “Target Pool”. I unloaded it and what you see is what I see in real time as I take a look at the machine and what needs to be done with it. This video goes over a few things that I typically do before I even try to turn a game on.