Man, this hobby is getting out of hand. I make good money and can’t afford these toys at these prices. I’m glad Nintendo switch has tons of games for cheap compared to pinball. I guess I’ll go back to dreaming and seeking used pins again. This is nuts.

PoTC was not a hot seller in the long run, CEs were at almost every distributor unsold. A lot of PoTC had serious issues about of the box. And apparently PoTC had issues with parts suppliers.

PoTC didn’t become desirable until JJP stopped production on them early and said no more. Then everybody had to have it and shot the prices up like crazy.

I would venture to say if they made another run of PoTC, it wouldn’t sell like a lot of people on here think it would. They also wouldn’t have a “rare” and desired title produced anymore. The fact that PoTC is stupid expensive makes free advertisement for JJP, not towards pinsiders, but the rest of the world.

I spoke with Jack personally for about 30 minutes at TPF about the potc production. There were a few issues that were minor but the big one was parts suppliers. If you have all the parts to build a pin but lack one single part, you don’t have a pin to produce. Jack said they had a number of parts that the suppliers required several thousand units to be ordered before they would make another run of that part.

You can see how it becomes unprofitable to produce a machine when a manufacturer has to order thousands of parts beyond their production forecast to sit in inventories. Meanwhile, distributors were sitting on unsold inventory. So yeah, it made perfect sense to halt production.

The three spinning disks were mentioned earlier and how people backed out because it was omitted. Some people did initially, but ended up buying PoTC anyway. As an operator, I decided I was not going to buy PoTC because of the three disk, I was afraid it would be unreliable on route. I didn’t decide to buy a PoTC until they came out with a single disk. Honestly, the ball is more wild with the single disk set up anyway. Most people didn’t get to play the prototype 3-disk pins, I did and I can tell you the game is better with the single disk.

I’ve owned and operated 8 JJP pins I bought NIB. JJP tech/warranty support is second to none. JJP has been the cheapest pin to maintain for me and they have had the best resale value as a whole. I will say JJPs can be finicky at times but usually ironed out.

With the exception of the light board issues, I don’t know of any major issues that the expense fell on the owners.

I didn’t say I never had any issues with my JJPs. My PoTC was unplayable out of the box and not for just one issue. But I was able to get the parts I need at no expense.
I did have playfield issues on more than one pin, JJP resolved that to my satisfaction. I didn’t have lightboard issues because the two WoZ pins I bought were 2.0.

I know my experience is not anybody else’s, but I have had more NIB JJPs than most, and I routed every single one of them with great success. You get what you pay for. I routed literally tons of sterns and didn’t have much success with stern support and parts unless I opened up my checkbook and also had to go through my distributor to get parts most of the time.

I’ve never been a “fan boy” of any brand, I am a fan boy of those who supported me and my operations and JJP definitely did that.

Put your money where you are supported. Support your distributors and manufacturers who support you no matter how big or small of a buyer you are.