It makes you wonder what happened? Fire? Water damage? Did he die and his kids threw his collection in a field before selling his house?..........I need to re type my WILL.

SO WISH I hadn’t clicked on this thread...

Sad.....hope the parts for the F2K help your buddy......Great game!

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Somebody needs shot.

I hate these threads.

Wow what a shame.

Collectively if everyone took a prized rare or primo game and found a quality location to donate to charity, more kids would see these games as they were supposed to be, and wrecking yards would not likely be the magnet for old games. Just a thought.

Some of these may just need a fuse!

.... or two...

It will buff out...........

Somebody here said that maybe 5% of EMs may still be around. I understand that now.

Seriously, I see a lot of good usable parts there. Evaporust is your friend.
I would pick them up.

Not the Williams!! What a kick in the gut. My em is crying now, those are his family! Shame on those who did this!

...or, "In good condition for there age."

Easier said than done. A few years ago, when temporarily downsizing, I tried to donate a pin to the local boys and girls club and they wanted nothing to do with it. They would have taken a playstation / console, but did not want an arcade machine.

Or they just need a new cord, then they’ll power up.

RIP pinballs, you'll be missed.

PS I know this is cliché but could it be just a fuse? Looks like there is one missing....

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Exactly. Without someone on staff who already works with arcade & pinball machines, it's too complicated, too costly, and too time consuming to maintain. If you offered to place a game and service the game free of charge, then they might accept that arrangement.

I always cringe at various comments "donate it to charity"--a lot of charities actually refuse all sorts of things that people want to donate because of the burden of time and finance that the donation might incur after the fact. However, they will usually accept things that are in line with what they are already doing.

I'm sorry I was not more clear.

Take a game that is heading to the dump, fix it up, put it on location and take the earnings (donated space and electricity by the location, and your time and machine) to cooperatively donate to a local food bank, charity for dogs/cats, or whatever floats your boat. Put pictures and the information each time you donate into a local rag 'feel good section'. Business benefits, you keep a game from the trash, and kids of all ages get to mess with old games they will never see again due to exactly what you described above.

I know someone that has placed up to ~1/2 dozen old games of their rather large collection and put them on location at various businesses with this formula. During the past 6+ years those games brought in about $24,000 US in quarters, 100% (yes, all of it) donated to local charities. About the same amount in travel time and parts was donated by the 'operator'. It apparently worked well (stories of damage was minimal, and most location owners loved it along with their patrons). There has to be a level of commitment by all involved for this to work. Finding the right location apparently takes a bit of 'search and destroy' mentality, since it doesn't make money for anyone but a 3rd party beneficiary.

So again, sorry for the miscommunication or understandings. Hopefully this clears it up, and others take this model and use it or expand on it for their own needs or demands. Its a shame to see this stuff get tossed out and forgotten, I think we all agree on that.

I'm no expert but can you name the pins in the piles?

I look at things like this a bit differently. When these games broke down and were taken out of service, there were probably few parts to fix them. They became parts games very quickly in order to keep another game running on location. All of a sudden it was a non-running hulk of scrap. And in case nobody noticed, pinball machines are pretty big. So storage was an issue.

Today it is inconceivable to us that a broken game couldn’t be fixed. I can call Steve, I can call Marco. I can buy an Alltek and that dead game springs to life. I can buy those special game specific parts to keep them running right. I can google just about anything and poof, info on how to fix it is served to me on a silver platter. I have online forums like Pinside where I can ask an obscure tech question and usually get an answer.

You used to need to have all the information yourself. If you hadn’t learned all the electronics and theory of the games, you couldn’t fix them. It was a different world.

Feel free to disagree, but as you do, think about having 40% of your collection down, and there were no parts, and anything you learned on the internet didn’t exist. Heck, there are games I never would have bought if parts weren’t available because I’d have a bunch of 250 pound piles of junk to stack stuff on top of.

Bally SuperSonic

Gotllieb Royal Flush

Flight 2000:

Definitely get the drop target assembly--also work in 9 Ball.

Get those plastic pop bumpers.

And the plastics. And coin door. And transformer.

Might be able to finally use Novus 3 on something here.

bah, that will buff right out.

Just a little of elbow grease will fix that right up.

Added over 6 years ago: See the added photos if they come up, a fairly rare Hit the Deck I parted out. Painful to do, but was so sun and water rotted, it had to go.

As I've said before, if the owner of the scrapyard doesn't care, try to record some serial numbers for posterity, even just post them in this thread, the ones on the crossmember is probably survived. I would break these down completely, strip ALL the hardware, post it up online for fellow collectors, you could probably sell it. As evidenced in many posts, lots of guys would love these even in their crap state.
Some Novus and Evaporust and the hardcore resto guys are more than happy!
It's too bad these games are trashed but the way I see it, many games can live on through there parts!