Grapevine, TX
Always fascinated by pins, my first memory of playing was around 1976-a Bally Wizard!. Fast-forwarding to 2002, I bought my first two pins together-a 1970 Williams Aces & Kings and a 1962 Williams King Pin. The King Pin worked from the start, and with only a cleaning of one of the stepper units, continues to work to this day, and resides in my game room. Aces & Kings took 3 months to get it running!
My background really couldn't be better suited for pin restoration than what it was; A lifetime scale modeler, amateur artist and electrician/electronics/RF technician. Little did I know how eventually, the stars would align to provide a budding career.
Throughout the early 2000's, working at respectable tech positions, my only goal throughout each day was to get home and work on a game, as it provided the satisfaction of productivity I just couldn't find at my day job. Totally hooked! I started showing up to the local annual pinball show, and my restos started winning awards. Fellow collectors started asking for me to restore THEIR games.
Continuing to work a day job and restore games for others and myself, I was laid off from an aerospace contractor in 2011. At Christmas. Three weeks after buying a new house.
With my wife's approval and a garage full of projects to restore for others, I built a small workshop in my backyard and went full time restoring the full palette of coin-operated arcade games for collectors. Very quickly, my business spread nationwide without any real promotion or advertising outside of the quality of my work. With my "day job" career in a shambles nowadays, I consider it a true blessing to be given the opportunity to do this work for a living, and never in my life have I met such a large contingent of great people along the way. I've made more money doing other things, but this has been the most fulfilling, and in my opinion, the most important.
