I got into this hobby during the great lockdown of 2021. I found a couple okay condition arcade machines that I fixed up. Then I found a couple pinball machines barely working at an estate sale. Then fixing up arcade machines just became my hobby. I also just enjoy the community and how people love to help and keep arcade alive even if it's just at home. I live near a major arcade so I don't really collect as much as I get machines I can repair or that I really connect with.
I decided to make my thing a full refurbishing of machines. Not just getting them working but making them like new if possible. Sometimes I look to make enhancements that were never there and sometimes I have to make parts by hand because true replacements don't exist. Figuring out how these things work is fascinating and since my day job is engineering software, having a hobby of engineering hardware is a close but nice break.
Sometimes it's frustrating but nothing is quite like getting something working that you can see in real life.
