"use in a well ventilated area" or..."that time i blew my beard off"

a buddy had this old 1975 gottlieb abra cadabra, it had been in his family for years. it had been rescued from a house fire some number of decades back...the guys that were gutting the place after the fire dropped the machine and the back box broke off, so the insurance company wrote it off and one of the movers, my buddys dad, decided he'd try to fix it.

fast forward twenty years and his grandmother was moving into a new place but couldnt bring the table with her, (not that it ran anymore anyhow,) so it ended up over at my house. the back box had been dutifully repaired to its original dimensions, though it was just plywood, and basically nothing else worked... it wouldnt register a ball in play, all the advance units were jammed up, the rubber was obviously mostly dust, etc etc etc...so i set off with a can of electric cleaner and some q-tips, pretty much hitting everything i could, trying to knock off all the corrosion i could find. and for short little bits of time this worked...we got it to register a ball in play, which meant the flippers and scoring could now be verified....it led to more problems, but as each one presented itself id shut the machine down, grab the electronics cleaner and the q-tips and go to town. things were moving along smoothly, and i was quite pleased with myself for being so industrious in the face of a machine i had only a cursory knowledge about.

so this is going on for a few weeks, and the something-or-other kept sticking on me...i found if you just kind of douse this one area of what i called the "brain motor" it would mostly work itself out, so thats what i was doing. and on this day, aided by several tasty adult beverages, i doused the pants off it. i mean real good. and i gave it time to air out, i swear i did. but i also vividly remember thinking "you know, if this touches off when i hit the reset button, i had better have this coin door open so the pressure has somewhere to go" which you can debate amongst yourselves as being a good or bad idea, but thats what i did...i left that door open and was staring right into the belly of the beast when i hit that reset and FOOOOOOOOOM!

i was blown backward, right on my butt. all the change in my pockets came spilling out and in that moment my mind believed the machine was throwing money at me as it exploded...the bottom panel on the pinball machine, which was 1/4" plywood INSIDE a dado, was blown right out of the bottom of the cabinet, and my beard had basically totally melted off, which was a real bummer because it was my favorite one. a friend was there to witness this spectacle, and while alarmed for my safety at first, he pretty much broke himself laughing the next instant, as i came up from the other side of the machine, wide-eyed and dazed, looking like doc brown from back to the future, hair blown back and bits still smoldering.

luckily, the machine was basically no worse the wear. and the thing that was sticking actually freed up, though i will not exactly recommend the "fireball method" of machine maintenance. we stuffed the bottom of the cabinet back into its slot and retired to the bar, having truly earned it this day, and also to mourn the loss of our fallen comrade, my trusty beard, who had so selflessly thrust himself in front of the fireball, like any good soldier upon a live grenade, for the sake of his platoon. he will be missed.