Lately I’ve been putting some of my games up for sale, and I get a lot of people who have never owned pinball machines contacting me. They have a romantic idea of setting up a game room for their kids and remember pinball machines fondly and want to have one at home. Sounds great right? I agree it can be very rewarding… but you have to know what you’re potentially getting yourself into. A pinball machine is not like a regular modern amusement device. Let’s go over the pros, cons and pitfalls of owning pinball machines, and while you think your kids will enjoy it, are you sure? Let’s dive in and talk about it!
Category Archives: How-To
WPC game doesn’t boot up? Let’s diagnose this Gilligan’s Island.
You turn on your game and… “BLECH!” that’s what you get? That’s not good. Let’s try to figure out what exactly is happening:
Armed with more information, later on I have some time to pull the driver board and diagnose things further:
Upgrading to LED lighting: Bally Mystic
The other day as I was working on my Bally Mystic, I decided to upgrade the lighting in the backbox to LED and document what I consider to be a “tasteful” way to migrate from traditional incandescents to LED lighting. Some people complain about this but I think if you do it right, it’s a dramatic improvement, and in some ways is hard to tell from older style lighting. Let’s take a look!




How to break down a pinball machine for storage or shipping
If you have a game you are looking to store temporarily, or ship, here are some tips on how to break it down and store it to make sure it stays in good condition.
How to install a shaker motor in a pinball machine
In this 2-part series I go over installing a shaker motor in a Stern Jurassic Park pinball machine. I also run into a few weird glitches with the hardware sent me. That’s the world of pinball… nothing ever goes 100% smoothly does it?
Pinball flipper doesn’t work? Here’s a checklist of where to look.
As soon as I thought I had the game operational, I waxed the playfield and got ready to put it back together only to find out one of the flippers was out. This was a rather tricky issue that took a little bit to figure out — not your typical flipper problem, so I thought I’d do a video of it and go through the process of diagnosing why a flipper might not work (on a Bally-35 early solid state game).
Replacing a DMD on Williams Slugfest Pitch and Bat game
I’ve had this game sitting around for awhile and finally got around to looking at it. I shot a few videos awhile back and forgot to publish them, so here’s a useful short video on how to access the DMD in Slugfest. It’s nowhere near as easy as you’d expect as it is in a regular pinball machine.