This whole thing is sad...
The hobby needs the boards, guessing he may be good a boards and needs a face for the customer service side.
Hoping this is resolved for the thread OP

I purchased a WPC 89 power driver board and it works great. I used it for a couple of months in my Roadshow and I have no complaints. I just don’t need it anymore so it is for sale if anyone needs one. looks perfect, works perfect, and I will sell cheaper than new and no sales tax! Thanks Mìke

SOLD!

Parts - For Sale

Power driver board Archived

Used, good condition - “Pinball basement power driver board. A-12697-3 WPC89 power driver board. I purchased it new. Used it for about two months in one game and just don’t need it anymore.. nothing w...”

2022-08-18

Chester, MD

MikeSinMD

300 (Firm)

Archived after: 42 days

Viewed: 462 times

Status: Sold (amount private)

And someone might actually get the board too!

Seems like he has excuses. If you have issues, shut down and make people whole. If you get the issues ironed out, open back up but will take a lot to come back from this crap show.

DB70BF25-B82A-4535-8DA8-BEE45977998E.gif

It’s beyond saving - he’s done this sort of thing so many times now. With the ‘oh, shipping this week’ and then no boards and more emails later another supposed shipping date. It blows my mind that he’s still getting business. At some point You can’t run a successful business without decent customer service, much less completely abysmal to non-existent service.

Sounds like a classic case of funding prior orders with new sales. That model never works.

I saw the pinside threads talking about poor quality right before TPF22 , my original plan was to buy boards in person, but the customer complaints changed my mind.

Do we have a list of people who bought a bought from him through Pinside? Or does he do much selling on Pinside?

If it weren't for pinside I would have never heard of the guy.
What's maddening is that when I purchased he generates that shipping label within a day or so. So you think, cool, my board will be here in a week or so. Then you check tracking a week later, nope, only a label created. Another week goes by, then another, still just a label with ups tracking number.
Then after about 7-8 weeks, I finally got my wpc89 cpu.
He needs to stop the generating label thing that makes people think this will happen In a timely matter.
However, looks like he should shut down, get healthy if that's what it is. Build up tons of stock, then actually ship within a day of someone's purchase.
I have a gut feeling he's slipped into a ponzi scheme at this point where he needs sales and cash to finish projects. He' robbing Peter to pay Paul at this point.

ForceFlow , I think in the end he was made whole. If mistaken without looking, it also took many months. System 11 board tester, it was last year.

The part I find the most fascinating is all the people saying the soldering job on the boards is sub par and components were loose or come off the boards.
How does one get into the business of selling PCBs if they can’t solder?
That’s like opening up an auto shop and not knowing how to change oil.

He is now advertising New improved Flipper Boards on FB. I wonder how many flies he can catch with that Honey? Send your money now and wait. LOL.

Sorry I am trying to stand up for the good guys getting taking advantage of. @robin, this place is a shitshow. You have the insane running the asylum. You usually ignore me but I hope you don’t Butch. To allow this BS of rip off cheaters should be called Shitside. Come here to get ripped off. Sad.

Apparently trying to support moderator getting burnt is not allowed.

WTF. JUST SAW THIS!!

I do not have any skin in the game however, I was amazed to see that another was “moderated” for “criticizing” pinside staff. WOW!!!

If, and I say if, this sites primary objective is to further the hobby and help those in the hobby (while reasonably expecting to be profitable) than this company should be on a blacklist that is publicly available.

However, doing so by the Pinside company would open themselves to litigation and I am sure that is what is trying to be avoided though at the cost of decent members on this site.

It is unfortunate that in todays world there are those that are hesitant to do the right thing for fear that the losers will litigate against them.

In my business, and I am owner, I say “F” the losers.

This site would do all honorable members a great service by finding a way to illuminate business’ like that that have been named here. I get the whole litigation thing but there comes a time…..

Oh well.

Found him here....boards looked great and figured he was tied to PPS, so legit......never got 1 that worked properly .....lots of promises, 1 replacement where parts were already rattling in the box, then nothing......but broken promises.

Below is not a direct response to the quote. The quote is being used as an example.

I have avoided posting in this thread for various reasons but there is one very obvious reason. I will stay away from most of the potential conflicts. Not interested in the drama. Only interested in helping people.

Soldering and quality of soldering is one thing but ...

Support is another aspect that most people often ignore when purchasing products. Price is often the primary factor involved in decision making. Cost however can be considered a slightly different concept. Think of it like "cost = product + maintenance/support". Any manufacturer of a product should stand behind their product with good support. Making and building PCBs is one thing but support and troubleshooting is a whole separate thing. Customers should NEVER turn to a forum for their board support as their first option yet I often see posts like "I bought a board from <insert third party company>. I am having a problem with it. Can someone here help me?". Why the person posting does not directly contact the manufacturer (or the merchant/distributor) is beyond me.

Enough ranting. I'll try to stay out of this thread as much as possible.

The hobby doesn't need this clown.. there are other options, including upstarts who do PHENOMENAL work like DumbAss - https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dumbass-test-and-reproduction-pcbs

This Pinball Basement guy was a clown that was enabled by Planetary Pinball no less!

Both robin and PPS should be yanking any support from this guy. This story has been going on for AGES in the thread where he announced his products. He doesn't have the ability to correct the boards correctly, has admitted he doesn't have the tooling or process to do so, and believes his work is 'good enough'. yet no contract facility on earth would allow the kind of work he does to go out the door. It's flat out criminal to be selling his junk as he does.

A fat 'DO NOT BUY THIS CRAP' thread needs to be pinned and the guy should be banned from peddling it here. Or automatically put a huge disclaimer on every post he makes.

Truth...I really have myself to blame....should have gotten him to provide a solid replacement for the first faulty board before believing the next " batch" had been tested and bought 4 more. The PPS connection had me rest that he was vetted already.

" hindsight is 20/20" as they say

It's more like... opening an modern auto shop with a set of Kmart hand tools.

He tries to produce the boards with a subpar process that doesn't complete the solder job properly.

Thanks for the heads up. I won’t do business with this guy/company. Don’t offer product if you can’t deliver. Simple 101 business practice.

Is this the same guy that sold you that taxi

I eventually got the board, so I'm not empty-handed, at least. Believe me, I felt that I exhausted all my options to handle the matter privately before posting publicly. I really don't like posting negative things about small businesses, and I hate to sound disparaging, but it was probably one of the worst and disrespectful business experiences I have ever had with a seller, made worse to then have the situation turned around on me like I did something wrong to deserve that treatment.

The board I did get is still sitting in a box waiting to be reworked. I may get to it on a slow day in the winter. Though, I ended up buying a board from barakandl at nvram.weebly.com instead just so I could pop a board in a game without having to fiddle with and troubleshoot something that shouldn't need troubleshooting. Thankfully, there are options for certain boards.

I did get a blank PCB from DumbAss for something else a while back--really pleasant to buy from; communicative, and very supportive, proud, and enthusiastic about his boards. I'm also amazed at how fast he churns out new PCB designs.

Anyway, here it is 6 months later from my experience with pinball basement, and it seems from what people are saying is that Charlie is still pulling pretty much the same shenanigans. I made suggestions on areas where he could improve--more proactive communication, putting stock limits on the number of items available for sale, improving on testing & QA, plus other odds & ends. It doesn't sound like anything changed, unfortunately. It's really a shame that it sounds like he continued down the same path as before. Accepting someone's money and then not following through in a timely manner with zero proactive communication is not the best way to run things.

So, I certainly wouldn't buy from him in the future. Questionable product, questionable fulfillment, and no support? No thanks, not worth the aggravation or hassle. It's hard for a new business to build trust, and this can be a really forgiving/supportive crowd towards a one-man show, but once that trust has been chipped away and is gone like it is in this situation, it's extremely difficult to earn back.

The latter is really tough to approach fairly and objectively. Plus sometimes things change over time (either positively or negatively--remember what happened with pinbits going mysteriously AWOL?). And then the subject of attention may not take kindly to being listed on a negative list, and could retaliate in any number of ways. You'll probably notice that in most hobbies, there isn't any sort of centralized warning list. Usually there are threads like this where a whole bunch of people comment. Then it just gets linked to whenever someone else posts questions about that particular person/company. There are reasons why it's handled that way.

I'm not sure exactly would be expected here. He is not currently selling anything through the marketplace or shops. Running a business seemingly poorly (and outside of Pinside) isn't against the forum rules. As for the suggestions of banning floating around, that would mean closing a line of communication, which a few folks appear to be (attempting?) to utilize. There are usually many steps to get through before reaching the point of a permanent site ban, and banning for the sake of momentary satisfaction or karmic justice just isn't one of them.

On the upside, very rarely is there ever a serious wide-spread issue with a particular seller, either on or off Pinside. I'm thankful for that, at least.

Y'know this seller reminds me of the guy who did the BSD coffin mods some time ago. The only thing different is that he had an EXCELLENT product he was selling. Delivery was another story however. He stated that he too, had health issues. This seems like a pattern. Eventually after listening to "2 more weeks" (for delivery) for what was months, I had to do a chargeback.

Rework his introduction thread into a WARNING and Review thread - Editing the opening post to add the warnings, and pin the thread. Let google and the community traffic serve as the blacklist against him.

After Skit-B (Some Kids in the Basement) and now this, I will be avoiding any company that has basement in the title

Yeah — Brock. He did have great product and indeed, the parallels are eerily similar. Constant excuses why items haven’t shipped, complete lies about item ‘shipping or shipped this week’ over and over. Had to keep nagging for months and months to get products you paid for.

I haven’t ordered from the basement but I dealt with Brock so I’m familiar with the complete BS and it pisses me off for everyone involved getting the shaft here with bad products and piss poor communication.

I agree. And while I always try to avoid taking sides, there seems to be enough evidence of bad business practices here (including my own interactions with the business owner).

I have added a notice to the top of their announcement post here: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/grand-opening-of-the-pinball-basement-check-it-out#post-5858224

I'm still debating on removing the Biz from Pinside altogether. If the company doesn't change it ways, they have no place on Pinside. I have worked too hard to establish Pinside as the safest online place to buy (used) machines and parts, so I don't take any of this lightly.

Thank you so much for doing this!

Yeah, been following this for a while. Really a shame too because it's nice to see some original board reproductions being made. I've watched many people ask for status updates to be met with the runaround...I mean soldering those is likely no small task, but the better thing to do would be admit that, and limit purchasing to what you have stock of. Or better yet, even offer them as kits for others to solder. I've seen enough people doing that in the arcade collecting community. Sorry you got backed into a corner on it - seems you went about bringing it up respectfully to, so hats off to you.

Not the first complaint I heard about this Charlie!
I know Bob ( Butch ) to be a stand up guy!
That’s all I need to know!

Cannot upvote this idea enough, horses don't change their colors which has been already long established. You really don't need this type of bad business on your site dragging down what you already went through in great lengths to make it an awesome place to chat and buy.

I don't know how many that need to reach Charlie are on Facebook, but he looks to be active there. Just a PSA.

pasted_image (resized).png

Why in the hell is he making a replacement Bally/Stern board when there are many other good boards already on the market ?

Because he is broadening his base of customers sending money and getting shipping labels.

Can you report fraud on there?

Someone needs to call the local PD and start reporting theft, I suspect it is past felony levels at this point.