Three Quick Updates

Ah, spring is here, and it’s getting hard to resist the temptation to head outside and play in the sun. Despite the gorgeous temptation of procrastination, things are still chugging along.

First — as of today, Vintage Pin Works is actually a real business now! All of the licensing is dealt with and today is the effective start date. Yipee, we are now entitled to make transactions and pay our taxes.

Secondly — our business cards are printed and here. It turns out the first batch ordered had a real snafu with the shipping company. As in, it was quite literally run over by a truck. Tire print and all! But, thanks to the power of good customer service, a new expedited order made it our way. And now, we have some sweet cards to exchange with folks we meet. Alright!

Third — ah, who am I kidding, there is no number three. I’ve actually been doing quite a bit of research into a few more business administrivia tasks, but unfortunately there isn’t much progress to report there. It turns out there are a lot of online store fronts to pick between these days, and quite a few places that do prints-on-demand, but we haven’t managed to land on the right solution yet. We’re still exploring our options, and hope to have some more details once there’s a concrete plan of action.

So, that’s it for this week. Next week should be a lot more fun to share about as I dig back into the Bally Beach Club restoration.

And then there were lights!

Last time I blabbed on about the Bally Beach Club restoration, I ended with a bit of a tease about what came next. It turns out, it’s just too hard to resist the allure of plugging in a table and giving it a good once over to see how things work. So, after completing the preliminary cleaning, we gave in and decided to fire up the table.

First things first, we made sure to have a fire extinguisher handy. Given that visible fire damage inside this table, it’d be a bit foolish to just fire it up without having a little caution at our side. We also made sure to pick a fire extinguisher that is both easy to use and rated for electrical fires.

With fire extinguisher in hand, we plugged the table in. Then, we crossed our fingers and flipped the switch on the left side of the back box.  The good news is that the fire extinguisher wasn’t actually necessary — but the peace of mind did help. The bad news is that we were greeted with a whole lot of nothing. The back box innards whirled to life as the search plates spun, but there were no lights, and no playfield action. Womp womp womp….

Of course, what did we really expect from a table that had been sitting unused for so long?

Given the utterly underwhelming attempt to fire it up, it would have been tempting to go back to cleaning things. But it’s hard to stay motivated on prettying up a table that might not even work. This means it was time for a little lightweight troubleshooting. First things first, we turned off the power and unplugged the unit, just in case there were any odd shorts in there looking to provide a good zapping.

Next up, we opened up the back box and lifted the playfield to get a good look at everything. First, each of the stepper units was manually reset to it’s initial position. This is important, because with some gummed up steppers it’s possible to get some very confused circuitry going on. In this table’s case, there were some particularly funny combinations going on, and it seemed simplest to give the total reset stepper a good push.

Then, with the playfield back in place, and the back box still open, we plugged it back in and fired it up. And there were lights! Well, most of the lights anyways; a few burnt out items needed to be replaced. But still, it was gorgeous to see:

Such a pretty sight. Here’s one more from another angle:

 

And it wasn’t just a few lights on the playfield, either. There’s full illumination on the back glass, too:

Giddy off the excitement of all of this, I powered it back down, closed the back box, and tried to fire it back up again. Nothing. Hrmph, well that’s frustrating! After opening it back up and doing a little poking, it turns out there was a loose wire in the cabinet that just so happened to come into contact with the main control motor whenever the back box door closed. Odd, yes, but easy to fix by isolating the bare wire and ensuring it wouldn’t make contact again.

With that quick fix, we fired up the table again. After manually hitting a few more switches and buttons, a few more of the mechanisms started to come to life, and we even had time to play a few games, but things just aren’t moving smoothly yet. The shutter board is unreliable, and starting a new game is a pretty iffy procedure that often requires a few steppers to be manually put back into position.

But, hey, that didn’t stop me from scoring a fake bingo or two:

Sorry for the tiny cellphone pic; I was too excited to bust out the camera on that one. Anyhow, it looks like there’s a whole lot more cleaning and lubrication left ahead of us…. better get to it!

Gambling and Pinball: A Brief History

When we think of pinball today, most people think of fun, complicated games where the goal is to compete for a high score and have a good time. Many people are often surprised to hear that pinball actually has a bit of a dark history when it comes to the law. For decades, the devices were used primarily for gambling, and the state and federal governments were none too amused about it.

To understand how we got to today’s “for amusement only” pinballs, we need to take a brief step back in time to the early 1900’s. Electro-mechanical amusement devices were popping up all over, and followed a variety of themes. Horse racing, bowling, and bingo were all rather popular themes. And, of course, there were the simple bagatelle styles devices. With the addition of coin-op pin tables in the 1930’s, it was only natural that someone would think up a way to make things profitable, and gambling has long been a profitable enterprise.

So how did gambling some into play? Well, you put a coin in one of these devices, you shoot a ball, and where it lands determines the degree of payout. It was actually pretty simple back then, as pinball tables didn’t even have flippers. The only real change for “skill” was how far back you pulled the plunger that launches the ball.  

Naturally, Johnny-Law wasn’t too keen on these devices, and regulations started popping up everywhere to prevent the scourge of pinball driven gambling. Unfortunately, things weren’t very centralized back then, and there wasn’t really a single definition of what constituted a gambling device. This led to a crazy series of patchwork laws all over the United States, with different states and municipalities offering their own interpretations of what made a pinball illegal. Was it the ability to win credits? Or is it the element of chance? Maybe it’s about the number of balls? It all depended on where you were and who your were asking.

With such a crazy patchwork of anti-gambling laws in effect, pinball manufacturers constantly tried to innovate to stay ahead of the law and to ship their tables to as many places as possible. This led to sneaky “knock off” switches under the table to surreptitiously pay out the credits. In places that were a bit more rigid about credits, it led to other odd gimmicks like earnings a free game or a free ball that couldn’t so easily be cashed out. These features are still alive and well on modern tables, even with the gambling component long gone.

One particularly odd restriction was the limitation on balls. For awhile, there were some municipalities that outlawed devices containing one ball. In hindsight, it seems like a rather arbitrary limitation, but at the time no one had thought up the notion of using multiple balls. But soon they did, and this was a big driver of the multi-ball bingo tables gaining traction in the 1950’s.

Perhaps oddest of all is the story of the flipper. Flippers weren’t introduced into pinball until 1947. Before the flipper, it really was a game of chance based on how the ball bounced against the pins. With the introduction of the flipper, though, manufacturers started claiming that pinball was a game of skill, and therefore it had nothing to do with gambling. There were even retrograde modifications made to older tables to add flippers and suddenly make them “legal” under a particular jurisdiction.

All this cleverness aside, pinball as a form of genuine amusement eventually did take off. And, frankly, that’s the piece of pinball that is still alive and well today, and it’s probably what you think of when you hear the term pinball. Aside from pachinko, gambling has largely left the pinball industry. But, you can definitely still see hints of pinball’s original gambling culture if you peek around. You see it every time you walk up to a table and see the “For Amusement Only” placard clearly visible.

And, who knows….. without pinball’s history of gambling, maybe it never would have taken off in the first place?

A Little Bit of Spit Shine

Okay, so we didn’t use any real spit, but with a bit of spit shine and elbow grease, our Bally Beach Club is just starting to show the first hints of her original charm. Now, restoration isn’t as simple as just plugging her in and hoping for the best — there’s actually a lot that ought to be done before firing things up.

First things first, we gave the table a good once over with a damp rag to get the surface layer of grime off.

Okay, so maybe we didn’t do the most thorough job of cleaning things off. As you can see, we clearly need to do some additional cleaning with non abrasive cleaners. For this first round of cleaning, we weren’t focused on cosmetics — we really just needed to get the big chunks of grime off of the playfield before firing things up. Leaving grime on the playfield is a great way to scuff up the balls and cause additional damage to the artwork. It took several rags to get through the first coat of grime, but it made the playfield significantly smoother to the tough. We also took the opportunity to literally get rid of the cobwebs and give the whole table a good vacuuming, inside and out.

After getting through the preliminary cleaning we got down to replacing a few missing parts. As you might recall from our earlier post introducing this table, there are some serious parts missing from this table. But, of course we didn’t jump straight in to replace the missing coin door or anything major like that — we had to start with the bare basics.

For starters, this table was missing the most important part of a pinball table: the balls!

Now, as a bingo pinball table, the ball situation is a little different than what you’d expect to see on a more conventional table. Even though gameplay occurs one ball at a time, the machine is actually designed to take eight balls. Plus, the balls are just a tiny bit different in diameter than what you’d find on a modern table. Each ball on a bingo table is 1 1/8″ in diameter, instead of the more common 1 1/16″, but even with the odd sizing they’re still pretty easy to find at any major pinball supply website.

Installing the balls is a completely trivial task. All you do is plop them down on the playfield and they’ll roll into their natural resting place underneath the playfield. Nothing to it, really. Just make sure to put all eight in there or the right switches won’t be tripped to get a new game going later. The ball channel has a series of sensors underneath it that let’s the game know just how many balls are left to be played, and the circuits get mighty confused if it tries to restart and can’t “detect” that everything was returned to the ball trough.

Next up, we installed our rubbers. Part of the allure of a good pinball game is watching the ball bounce around. Given that the balls are steel, and most playfield parts are made out of plastic, we need a little something extra to get that nice bounce. On most parts of most tables, this is done through rubber rings.

Naturally, this poor pinball table’s rough life strikes again. For whatever reason, every single piece of rubber was missing from the playfield. Perhaps they were taken away by whoever absconded with the balls and coin door. Regardless, though, it’s a pretty simple fix. A quick online order is all it takes to get a fresh set of playfield rubbers, and some suppliers even sell bundled kits that include everything a particular model of pinball might need. Heck, even if we had the original rubbers on the table, it still would have been worth picking up a kit to replace them all. Over time, the rubbers lose their springiness and the table stops feeling as zippy as it should. It’s a cheap fix, an easy fix, and just not a worthwhile place to cut corners.

Basically, we did this:

 

And, then we did that again and again and again and…. well, you get the idea. This table uses dozens upon dozens of little rubber rings. It isn’t exactly hard work, just tedious and repetitive. After a few minutes, though, the whole playfield is a lot more complete:

 

Ah, yes, the sweet signs of progress…

Alright, so we put some balls in the table and we got some fresh rubbers onto the playfield. But that was about as far as things got before we could no longer resist the tempatation to actually plug ‘er in and see what worked. So, we grabbed our fire extinguisher and braced ourselves for disaster…

But I think that’s a good story to save for another day 🙂

Making progress

Just wanted to swing by and check in with some updates on what we’ve been up to. Things are still going to be a little quiet on the blog for the next while as we continue to setup shop. The good news, though, is that we’re not just sitting on our hands enjoying the sunny weather (although that does sound nice….).

First up, we’ve finally gotten around to shoring up the last bits of paper work. Somehow, these little things can be a real pain. There’s just something about actually holding down a day job that makes it awfully hard to finish up tasks that need to occur during business hours. Fortunately, we can finally check off a couple more items from our list: filing the city business license, and setting up a dedicated bank account. Small steps, sure, but every bit of progress counts.

And, now that we have all that squared away, we can finally do a very important thing: we can spend money! Well, at least we can spend it without having to worry about it getting mixed up with our personal accounts. So what was the honorary first purchase? Tickets to the Northwest Pinball and Arcade Show in Tacoma. We don’t have anything exciting to share out right now, so we’ll just be attending as visitors, but it should be a fun chance to get out there and see some pinball tables. Drop us a line if you’ll be there on Friday, and we’ll try to say “hi”.

Also on the list of accomplishments, we’ve procured some essential parts for the old Bally Beach Club table. Nothing super fancy, but definitely some important essentials: rubber rings, fresh light bulbs, springs, and most importantly the actual pinballs. With these pieces in place, we should be able to get some action shots posted of the table up and (sort of) running. Stay tuned for the juicy details.

B-I-N-G-O! Starting our first restoration

Alright, enough talk about business for a bit — let’s get down to business and talk about pinball. In particular, let’s talk about our first refurbishment: a 1953 Bally Beach Club. Here she is, exactly as we got her:

So the first thing you’re probably noticing is that this looks nothing like any pinball table you’ve seen at an arcade. There seem to be an awful lot of holes on the playfield, and where are the flippers?! Well, the Bally Beach Club is what’s known as a “bingo” pinball table. Back in the 50’s, these were actually a fairly common type of table. Back then, pinballs were often used as a gambling device, and the core of the gameplay was centered around chance. The entire flipper concept didn’t really get popular until the law cracked down on games of chance, at which point flippers came into play to turn it into a game of “skill”.

The game play on the bingo pinballs is actually pretty straight forward. The user deposits a coin, or several, and shoots balls onto the play field. As the balls land in individual holes, the corresponding number lights up on the glass backboard. If the user gets three or more lit items in a row, they score some credits. They’re also allowed to shout bingo, but that part isn’t required. Now, some of the tables (including this one) also let you deposit additional credits at the start of gameplay to unlock additional features, like rollover targets or select-a-spot features. But we’ll get into all that in more detail in a later post.

Now, this particular table has had a bit of a rough life, so it should be a nice challenge to fix ‘er up. This table popped up on Craigslist a few weeks back, so we took a drive out to a swap meet in rural Washington to have looksee. The seller had picked the table up from an estate sale as-is, and didn’t know much else about it. The table turned on, but he hadn’t been able to get it to light up, and there weren’t even any balls in it to run the game.

Upon thorough inspection, it turns out this table is awfully beat up. For starters, it was dirty. Really dirty, inside and out:

But a little dirt isn’t so hard to clean off. What else is wrong? Well, the cabinet isn’t original — it turns out someone rebuilt the base cabinet somewhere along the line. At first we thought maybe someone has just sanded off the original paint job, but the wood itself isn’t original to the time. The back box is the original wood, sanded down and lacquered, but the cabinet it just some plywood someone picked up at the hardware store. The rebuilt cabinet alone is enough to demote this pinball to a parts table to some folks, but we’re happy to press on.

As part of the cabinet rebuild, it also appears that a prior owner took out the coin door. Looking at the front of the table, there’s simply nowhere to access coins, and the top bar is missing the slot to insert them:

Well, as mentioned earlier, adding credits is pretty central to gameplay on a bingo pinball, so that seems concerning. It also means that we could safely infer someone along the way did a bit of rewiring along the way to make it free play. Well, now we can’t just stare at the schematic to debug problems — we also have to figure out the extent of the intentional rewiring that occurred.

Further inspection inside the cabinet reveals that the door rewiring might just be the least of our problems. In addition to a few other hanging wires and unexpected modification we found something a whole lot scarier: fire damage. Yep, this table sure has had a rough go of things.

Take a look at the replay registers, and look at all the soot on the coil second from the bottom:

That’s fire damage. And, peering behind that bank of registers, there’s a whole lot more fire damage. Well, drats, that’s concerning. But, hey, some people just love a challenge.

So, despite all the giant red flags that this pinball isn’t worth the trouble, we bought it. Now it’s sitting in the garage awaiting a proper restoration. Here is some of the work we need to get through:

• Clean off decades of dirt and grime. Inside and out, there’s a whole lot of cleaning to be done.
• Basic maintenance. Add a set of balls, add rubber rings to the posts, replace any dead light bulbs
• Get it fired up, and wrap our heads around what modifications were made to make it free play
• Refinish the legs and get them back on (seriously, they’re in oddly rough shape)
• Cosmetic essentials, like sealing the back glass and refreshing the playfields
• Electrical essentials, like cleaning gummed up steppers and contact plates
• Rewiring and adjusting old modifications to ensure proper game play

Over the next few weeks, we’ll take you through that journey, and along the way we’ll weave in a few posts about the odd history of gambling, bingo and pinball tables.

There’s No Money In Pinball

I’ve heard it said a million times, by all sorts of smart people:

“There’s no money in pinball!”

And, it turns out, it’s kind of true. Back in the 1970’s, a person could make a lot of money manufacturing or operating pinball tables. These days, it’s a different story. Sure, there is definitely a revival in the bar-arcade market, but there still isn’t much demand for actual pinball tables. With only two active pinball manufacturers in the United States, it’s safe to say this industry isn’t a hotbed of economic activity. The computing revolution that took off through the 1980’s and 90’s put the old fashioned pinball manufacturers on the defensive and led to a lot of competitive pressure from the video game market.

Looking specifically at the vintage side of things — aka, the old school tables that don’t have a silicon chip in sight — there’s even less money to be made. Classic electro mechanical tables certainly aren’t being manufactured these days, and many establishments are unwilling to bear the high costs associated with the maintenance on a refurb. This has left these devices relegated primarily to the enthusiast community, which is also having a modern renaissance, but still isn’t a big enough market to hang your hat on. When you couple this with the dwindling supply of replacement parts, it’s safe to project that the costs are going to keep rising while revenues keep on declining.

So why the heck is Vintage Pin Works getting into this business, and how on earth are we going to stay afloat? Good questions, really.

For starters, this business is run primarily to fulfill the mission you see in our tagline: preserving the art of vintage pinball. That is both the main objective and the guiding principle that propels this business forward. Now, being a business, the IRS and the department of revenue say we’ll need to make some money, but that certainly doesn’t mean we’re grubbing for big profits. The goal here is simply to make enough money to keep the vision alive and keep on preserving pinball, but certainly with no illusions of making big money or retiring in the Bahamas.

So with that said, we’ll still need to pull in some revenue, and the math looks pretty dicey on the surface. Let’s say you find a roughed up old table, put in a lot of elbow grease, buy all sorts of replacement parts, and finally get it polished up into a real gem. That’s a great accomplishment, no doubt, but it just won’t bring home much bacon. Unfortunately, this’ll probably be several weeks worth of work, and after covering the raw costs you’d be lucky to earn a few hundred bucks. That’s certainly not enough to keep the lights on, and who wants to play a pinball table without lights?

And, to add insult to injury, we’ll have put a whole lot of time and love into that table, but all we would’ve done is brought one vintage table back to one private collection.

So how do we do better — how do we plan to keep the lights on and share that love of vintage pinball far and wide? By focusing on the process, not just the end result. Vintage Pin Works is primarily about sharing the journey and growing the community around pinball. We’ll be blogging through the ups and downs of restoration, sharing insights and wisdom, connecting with other enthusiasts in the field and (hopefully) sparking the interest of those who aren’t pinball enthusiasts yet. Along the way we’ll try to pull in a little ad revenue, and maybe toss in the occasional affiliate link, but it’s all in the service of keeping the dream alive.

Furthermore, we believe that a pinball table doesn’t just have to hide in one person’s basement or garage (or bar). Every table has a history and deserves the right to be appreciated by a wider audience. Through out this process, we’ll be taking a whole lot of pictures. Sure, there’ll be some functional ones for the blog. But, we also plan to make artistic prints available through an online storefront. This way, pin lovers across the world will be able to appreciate the art of pinball, even if they don’t have the space for a full table. Because that’s part of how we spread the love, and that’s how we’ll keep pinball alive. One table, many homes.

And yes, of course, when all is said and done, tables will go up for sale. Keeping all the tables to ourselves just wouldn’t match up with our spirit of growing the community.

So, maybe there is no money in pinball. Or, maybe, there’s just enough to get by on. Guess that’s the risk of doing business. But either way, we’re doing it for the love of the game. And, hopefully, we’ll make enough money along the way to keep that love growing.

Ramping Up

In the early days of a new business, a lot of time goes to tasks other than the core of the business. Right now, Vintage Pin Works is focused on general start up activities, so unfortunately there isn’t a lot of action happening with actual pinball.

But, Vintage Pin Works is about more than just making money — we’re about sharing the passion and art of pinball with the world — so we’ll be blogging about the whole process, end to end. In general, we’ll try to keep the blog posts focused on pinball, but every once in awhile things will veer off towards the small business and logistics side of things. Authenticity is important, and sharing the process is just part of keeping things transparent.

Here’s the general check list we’re running through before getting to work on actual pinball renovations:

• Come up with an idea, a mission, and a name for the business Done!
• Determine the quantity and source of initial investments Done!
• Establish online accounts with our name: domain, email, blog, Twitter, FaceBook, Flickr, etc. Done!
• File a business license with the state Done!
• File a business license with the city
• Open dedicated bank accounts
• Setup and configure financial software
• Refine and iterate over the business model
• Establish short term and long term timelines for core activities
• Create business cards and other core collateral

And the list goes on. And all of this fun gets to happen before we make a single business transaction. The good news, though, is that the gears are turning and things are moving along. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to work through the logistics and start shifting gears towards what really matters: Pinball!

Welcome to Vintage Pin Works

There isn’t much to see here yet, but stay tuned for more content. Vintage Pin Works was founded to preserve the art of classic pinball. Our activities comprise of three main goals:

• Catalog and preserve the beauty of existing vintage tables. This involves going to various pinball expos, tradeshows, and proprietorships to photograph their tables (with owner permission, of course) and learn more about the history behind each table.
• Restore and refurbish poorly cared for classics. A lot of refurbishment these days is done either to make a quick buck or through a painstaking search for original parts. We try to find the middle ground here, especially since classic parts are a dwindling resource. Our restoration style maintains an authentic spirit, but we don’t shy away from modern touches.
• Build a new generation of classics. This part of the plan is a bit longer running, but it is crucial to carrying on the pinball legacy. We will build all new hand made classics leveraging real wood playfields, traditional chime-based sounds, and classic target oriented gameplay. Of course, it won’t be without some thoughtful modern touches, but you’ll just have to wait and see what we have up our sleeves.

Thanks for dropping by. Sorry there isn’t more to share yet — everything has to start somewhere, and this is just the beginning for us.

Feel free to drop me a line any time,

-Michelle Keslin