I was recently talking to Steve Young at PBR, and we had a great conversation about the state of the pinball supply chain. The top line is simply this: that while the days of distributors having old stock of pinball parts has long ended, we are reaching the end of the remaining supplies. No, not for your latest Stern, but for pins from the early era of SS games, favorites like Centaur, Fathom, and other machines from the era, we're hitting the end of the line for part sources. Specifically, this includes the supply of donor games, spare partially-populated PFs, old storage bins, and all the other sources we've relied on to bring dead pins to life. And while I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, the way we approach buying and restoring older pins is going to change. And it's been changing for awhile now.
Yes, there are some things we can get now, that we never could in the past - new playfields, new plastics, new backglasses, all lovingly remanufactured with great care and precision. And of course, we have options for LED displays and playfield lights, options to replace those old boards with newer electronics. Things like playfield posts and flipper bats remain available and plenty. So what's the issue?
Several game manufacturers, but primarily Williams and Bally, allowed the designers to include unique parts and sizes for things like ball gates, posts and other playfield items for their games. Meaning that when you look at a part number, for instance a gate on Centaur, ASE-2250-99, that -99 means the 99th version of the wire gate. Common sense would assume that games within a similar year and layout would use a standardized part size for economy. So you'd assume that a flipper return gate for Medusa, Flash Gordon and Centaur would all use the same gate, thus saving the extra cost and manufacturing time to produce unique gates. And we'd all assume wrong. In this case, they aren't the same. Bally and Williams allowed designers great leeway in these parts. Gottlieb did not. I do not have information on what Stern did back in the day.
What this means in practical terms is this - you cannot get replacement parts for some items, and that list is growing all the time. Some of you looking for game-specific ramps have run into this for years now. Finding replacement #555 sockets for Bally pins has become increasingly difficult to source. The unavailability of less flashy playfield parts, I believe, has run under our collective radar. It certainly had run under mine.
Gone or rare is the beater machine or partially populated playfield on ebay and other online markets. Perhaps local meets are still an option, though I cannot comment on this. I'm not certain about you, but I see far less machines being parted out these days. There's more interest in grabbing beaters and restoring them - because they have become too valuable and too desirable to be disassembled. And that's a good thing. But all this does mean we have to consider missing items more carefully before buying that next project pin - does it have all the hardware, and if not, are sources available? Some items are extremely difficult to find these days. If sources don't exist, are we willing to become manufacturers ourselves, creating one-off items for our machines, but unable to produce more than a few due to the cost of our time and labor? It doesn't appear that the cost of remanufacturing certain parts will ever make financial sense, so some pinball parts are going to continue to become scarce. I had thought there were only a few parts, like specific ramps, where hard to find. I hadn't realized how many smaller items are no longer available without a great deal of hunting.
These are new challenges, and one I'm certain our hobby with address. I found the discussion of current supply chains enlightening, I hope you do too.
New York, NY
