My 20 years in Pinball ....

I grew up playing Arcade machines in the late 70s and 80s, as I guess most of the people on Pinside did. When I was about 17 I bought about 6 Arcade machines from a "gone bust" auction and much to my mothers horror put them in her lounge!! Ghosts n Goblins, Time Pilot, 4 player Gauntlet, couple of others.

I bought my first pinball when I was about 18-19 .. a Gottlieb Solar City. I got it from a pizza shop which was closing down for $100! I restored it but after a while it got a bit stale so I sold it on. I wish I'd kept it ...

Shortly after I landed a F14 Tomcat, which at the time was only about 5 years old. I had that for years. One of my friends still has it.

I usually had between 1 and 3 machines for a long time. But when I gave up doing motor racing, I needed something else to play with and the collection has got a little out of hand! Pinball machines are a lot cheaper than motor racing, I can tell you that for free! My nickname "RotorDave" or "RD" comes from the racing days, as I raced 3rd Gen RX7s... see the thumbnail of my R-Magic racecar which I bought in Japan in 2002. I also had a number of modified RX7s as road cars. Great cars, fast as heck and cheap for the performance they give!

I also used to play lead guitar in a few hard rock bands in Auckland, including the New Zealand KISS tribute band which was good fun.

I was lucky enough to start collecting most of my pinball machines years ago when the prices were still pretty cheap. I did turn down some nice machines in those years which was a bit of a bummer as they would now be worth double the dough, but thems the breaks.

I have pretty much all the machines I wanted now, including the complete Williams System 11 collection. Now my new thing is collecting all the Solid State Bally machines from the late 70s to early 80s.

Thanks for reading!

Dave