How I got started

I played pinball during my teenage years and had only played games from the 70's and early 80's. Five years ago my 12 year old wanted to make a pinball machine after never even playing much pinball. I always encouraged my children to tinker with electronics and mechanical stuff. We used to pick up old electronic devices from the curb side and take the stuff apart (started doing this at age 7) and my child would make various simple devices (always with my supervision with 110 volts). This kid is not your typical kid. Spencer is overly causious with everything. Anyways Spencer had some solenoids from some old printers and some motors from VCR's, etc and made something that worked relatively well but being young and ambitouse wanted to make something more elaborate, without really appreciating the effort required. Utube helped feed Spencers imagination. I suggested we buy a working low cost pinball machine so we could learn how it works then maybe buy an old broken pinball machine and then could modify the playfield and use the flipper assemblies. Spencer also wanted to program this himself with a whole set of game rules and include a video monitor, the whole nine yards. Who was I to say you can't do that. We bought the first game six year ago , a $800 williams system 11 grand lizard. We fixed it up together and then I got the bug. We then bought a non working mata hari that was going to be the donor game but I was able to fix it and the cabinet was not deep enough for the toys and ramps wanted in the game. Sold that and bought a secret service that needed CPU work, could not repair the CPU board so that became the project game. We have been working on making our own pinball machine on and off for 4 years. Spencer mounted two computer in the cab, one for solenoid and swithc matrix and lamp matrix and the other for sound and video. Spencer programmed most of it using visual basic. I did most of the mechanical work, wood working and building ramps and subways. The whole project turned out to be much more that Spencer anticipated and he has moved on from Pinball and moved on to computer technology type hobies but like I said I got the bug and have bought , fixed up and sold several games all the while working toward making my own game (with his influence). This is how I have made playing , repairing and enjoying pinball one of my favourite hobies.