Hello Pinball Enthusiasts,
I thought it was time to start a thread where I can show our progress in the Homepin factory with all things Pinball and Arcade related. In fact this is the first thread I have started on Pinside.
For those who don't know who Homepin is I will explain briefly here (skip the next couple of paragraphs if you are already aware of Homepin).
Homepin was started about six years ago in a small electronic workshop under my house in Kuranda Far North Queensland Australia. Initially we manufactured replacement boards for numerous pinball machines. The idea to start a factory in China grew from my lifelong desire to run an electronics factory manufacturing "something". As I had been involved in the amusement industry from when I was 21yo I figured that pinball or something arcade related would be a good place to start.
For about 15 years I had been trading with China and had started a small office there in Guangzhou mainly sourcing things for various customers and also having items manufactured, checking quality and organising shipping for other customers. I was already in China several times a year often for a few months at a time.
Fast forward a bit and now I have a factory in Shenzhen (just across the border from Hong Kong) with many different machines from plastic injection to folders, lathes CNC milling machines and pretty much what you would expect in a factory including facilities for printed circuit board assembly. Homepin is a 100% Australian owned and run business. We do not have any Chinese partner and there is always an Australian engineer present in the factory supervising operations.
I want to make it totally clear here about what we do and about this thread. Homepin is an amusement company. In fact our registered Chinese business name is "Shenzhen City, Arcade Game Science & Technology Company Limited". We are not exclusively about pinball machines, we make anything relating to arcade machines in general and that happens to include pinball.
For various reasons we have found ourselves manufacturing licenced Video game tables under a very famous Australian brand name, "Hankin". Back in the day, Hankin was a very big player in the amusement industry in Australia and did quite a lot of manufacturing. They made the tables that we now build under licence and also made five models of pinball machines.
A.Hankin & Co are still in the amusement business to this day operating juke boxes and pool tables in hotels mostly around New South Wales. Homepin has a very close working relationship with the Hankin company.
Initially, after establishing the Homepin factory in Shenzhen, I didn't think much about continuing the manufacture of replacement PCBs but when we had some quiet times it occurred to me that it would make sense to make boards to keep the staff busy. To that end, the latest boards we are building are replacements for WMS MPU boards. The pictures below show our work on them and the jig that arrived this morning to enable us to test them before packing and shipping. It will take some time for us to wire the jig so it might be a week or so before we are ready to ship these boards out.
Official Homepin agents for all of our replacement board products are "Johns-Arcade" in Australia and "Pinball Life" in the USA.
A quick word about "other Pinside threads" relating to Homepin and Thunderbirds pinball. It was never my intention to have much of a presence in the USA or Canada initially. I wanted to get the factory running smoothly, have our first machine shipping and then work on further products that would be more suitable for those markets. Most know that things turned sour pretty quickly and "most" of that was connected with a few stirrers on here at that time. It seems the moderators are doing a much better job more recently of curtailing keyboard warriors (just my observation).
I intend to show various things as we are doing them in the factory because I know there are many who are interested. Sometimes these things might be arcade related rather than pinball but that's the business we are in. I welcome CONSTRUCTIVE or POSITIVE feedback. If you want to niggle or be negative please don't bother posting in this thread. Where possible I will endeavour to answer questions when they don't clash with commercially sensitive matters.