1985 Williams Sorcerer Pinball Machine - Sold

I have a knack for finding the most mistreated dirty machines. This one was buried in a guys workshop. The playfield glass had broken and the millions of tiny cubes of glass were scattered everywhere. All of the dust and dirt and smoke from his workshop made this machine quite a mess.

These pictures represent how dirty it was after the extensive vacuuming of the playfield and cabinet.

The biggest issues with the machine were that the ball wouldn't kick out of the ramp lock and the drow targets wouldn't reset. The owner had tried to fix them unsuccessfully. I wish I had taken a picture of it but he used a small "C" clamp and a length of angle iron to stop the drop targets from dropping so the game could still be played without them.

I went through the boards and replaced the transistors that should have been causing the issues. No luck. I worked on it for a couple of months off and on and finally gave up and sent it to a board repair expert. It came back looking pretty with a new NVRAM to eliminate the batteries, but still didn't work. Everything tested on his bench like it did for me. Finally I added a small wire to bridge the ground connection to the transistors and "Magic" it worked again.

The machine cleaned up pretty well and played great. I played it for about a year before I decided it was time to move it on.

This picture shows a chunk of missing paing and inserts that have raised and then been chipped away by balls on their edges. The correct fix would have been replacing almost all of the inserts and repainting the damaged sections. This game wasn't worth that to me, so I sold it.

1979 Stern Meteor Pinball Machine - Personal Collection

This was a great find. Traded a working machine for this one not working. Probably strange in the eyes of my trade partner, but this game is right in my wheelhouse. It has a great spinner and tons of drop targets. It has a space theme, cool basic sounds, and was in pretty decent condition.

The machine was pretty dirty, as almost all non working machines are.

 Pretty Dirty.

Needed to replace the Meteor targets.

 The old board was really a mess. I replaced it with a Rottendog replacement.

Finished product. Turned out well. The mylar on the playfield made the clean up go really well, but there are bubbles under the mylar where the inserts are. I'm living with it now, but may take the mylar off later. Great Game.

1986 Williams High Speed PInball Machine Custom Traffic Light - Sold

This machine was in my personal collection. It is a great machine designed by Steve Ritchie. It has great flow. I had a couple of issues with the machine and with the design though. First, when you hit the ramp (a very well designed shot) the ball travels through habitrails (which I love) into kickout holes. I found this cause a start/stop to the flow of the ball. I much prefer a ramp that flows back into the playfield or to the flippers so you keep playing. In the end, this is why I parted with this machine.

The second issue was the placement of the traffic light. this machine has a traffic light positioned sideways over the entrance of the ramp. The traffic lights where I live are positioned up and down, not sideways. This seemed silly to me. In addition, it blocked the view of the entrance to the ramp. I like to see where the ball is going in the game.

Solution: I moved the light to the left side of the game, positioned it up and down, and painted it yellow so it looks like a real stop light. I also cut off a lot of the clear protective guard on the top of the ramp to increase ball visibility. I found that the ball never few off of the ramp, so it was unnecessary in the curved section.

Here are some pictures of the customized traffic light:

You can just see the edge of the clear plastic ramp protector in the upper right corner of the second picture. It used to cover the whole corner of the ramp.

The plastic just to the right of the curve in the ramp was custom. My daughter painted it to match the other ramp plastics.

I remote mounted the batteries to avoid acid damage.