Think that there would be only a few(100 max?) people that would want to or even could do this.

That said I would like it.

I would love to build a pin from a kit. I have spent a lot of time restoring games, and honestly would find it fun just to assemble rather than disassemble, clean, fix, clean again, and reassemble.

It biggest problem with building an old game (like MM) would be getting a wiring harness with wires colour matching the owners manual. A lot of popular old games have/had most of their parts for sale at one time or another, or they mostly use generic parts that are found in many games. Most of the hobbiests guys here can populate a playfield, that's not hard. The MPU boards could be rottendog supplied. Wooden cabinets can come flat packed from VPcabs. It's almost possible to do this now, but it would take a lot of leg work. You could use modern led displays that don't require the high voltage also, so it's even safer than working on an old pin.

It would be great for the licence holders to supply kits for all the less popular games. Get as many parts available as possible to service these old games; and offer a "complete restore kit". For guys that just wanna buy everything at once.

I'd buy and build one if I could order a bk2k for $2000, and have it shipped to my door. I'm always working on "projects" and this would be a fun one.

Just my $.02

i like the "idea" of a kit, but i do not think it is practical.

would you have the cabinet sent in a flat pack? if so, i can see multiple problems with that. cabinet assembly is not easy, not everyone has the proper clamps, jigs, patients, etc to do that work. if you have prebuilt cabinet it will be more costly to ship.

do you get the wire loom precut and pre wired (labeled for each and every light, switch, coil, etc)?

what happens when the end user put the wrong screw in the wrong place and it comes up through the topside of their playfield?

i can see that it might alleviate some of the labor by doing it yourself, but i do not think it would be worth it in the end.

just my thoughts, your thoughts will vary.

The support costs would be enormous. If it was priced right, people would buy it. I don't think any company would be able to handle all the support calls from people screwing it up.

An insurance nightmare for the manufacturer

Will never happen

I built a MAME cabinet from a kit, and then loaded it with a PC running emulators and built a control panel loosely following instructions from a book and the Internet.

I would love to select a pre-drilled playfield using 1 out of a possible 4 or 5 combinations and install components along with some personally selected graphics.

I think this is completely doable if some elements (such as wiring) were significantly simplified.

People build cars using kits, this SHOULD be less involved and less of an insurance issue than that, right?

While I think this is most likely a bad idea its at least plausible. I just bought a Rostock Max 3D printer kit and assembled it using the 278 page assembly manual. Its comparable to the complexity of a pinball machine. But, by the time you pay the labor to pack the kit you could pay a little bit more and just build the darn thing.

Whoever sold this would have a tech support NIGHTMARE.

This is right up there with "Modular Cell Phone" as far as good-sounding, bad ideas go.

If it saved me a decent amount of money yeah I would be totally down with it. But it would have to be like at least 1k with all the time I would put into it.

That said someone could work that out.....easier to do you own custom thing!~

But does a kit car need to be inspected before it can be driven on a road?

Pinball machines deal with mains current
If they were battery powered, it would not be an issue

To me the issue would be what level of kit.

Do you solder your own boards and building your own wire harness or is it more of a "soft and gentle" kit and you just screw some parts onto the playfield and assemble a flat cabinet with some angle brackets?

It would be fun to do like the old Heath kits, but so many variables including a theme that everyone would like would make it very hard to work.

DIY kits already exist, as has been mentioned. You just need to assemble already existing replacement parts. If you can't do that on your own you are likely to have a hard time putting it all together even if someone put it all in a box for you as a kit.

For me I just find a mess of a pin and consider it a "kit" that I use as a base/manual to assemble a working pin.

There is a big difference between rebuilding something and assembling from scratch. I am pretty sure there are a few pinheads that would love to try, but for a lot of us, it isn't worth the risk.

So long as there would be good directions and exploded diagrams, this would be a project I could really sink my teeth into.

However, this would be a fairly difficult product for a seller to manage, I would imagine.

I actually like this idea, mainly because of price potential, but also because it sounds like a ridiculously complicated lego set. A NIB "kit" version of a MMr, AMH, & TBL would be awesome at $2000-3000. This idea could actually make sense for boutique manufacturers who have limited assembly resources, but I agree that it would take some serious "help line" customer service.
I think the harnesses would have to be pre-built and extra care would have to be taken in the directions, but dedicated buyers could apply decals, build assemblies, solder coils, solder header pins, etc.

You can buy kits for full sized AIRPLANES, so it's definitely possible from an insurance/liability standpoint.

Support would be the tough part. A possible solution would be to sell them without support, and then if you need help with something beyond a defective part you pay $300 or something for a support plan.

I have doubts this will ever happen though.

A lot of people get concerned about making a wiring harness. I am currently making a MM, and doing the wiring harness now (converting from NBA FB). Seriously, this is one of the easier parts of the job - once you get your head around it, it doesn't take much. Extra wire can be sourced for the exisitng NBA harness that isn't long enough. That said, i am rerouting a lot of the harness a lot more efficiently than factory, so using less overall wire.

In terms of a kit - i would love it, but suspect it is not worth it for the manufacturers. The few $$$ they would save in assembly (remember they have had to pay the up front costs for the assembly line anyway for all hte other machines), would probably be offset by the time they would need to spend on customer support when someone made an error and can't make their $4000 kit work. Chasing someone else's mistakes is never easy!

No, I don't. And I got my ass chewed last time I brought this up. Here ya go:

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/what-i-want-that-will-never-happen-diy-pin-kits-for-existing-games#post-1560065

the problem is the first guy that screws it up completely and burns his house down is probably going to sue you out of business. :/

I would almost think the biggest cost of manufacturing is labor.

Why else does a lot of manufacturing get shipped overseas?

I imagine an unassembled pile of parts for a modern machine would probably be around $3-4k.

There was an option to purchase RAZA as a kit right? or something.. forgot details. did anyone take that option?