Simple--they charge for their time.

Plus, if you've done several restorations already, you have the experience, tools, materials, and know-how already under belt.

Professionals have more experience and are more efficient with their time. Also, the pool of people doing high end restorations is small and thus in high demand. So the answer to your question is it isn't profitable for most but it is for a few.

Efficiency of process through years of experience can do a lot for a bottom line. I'm amazed at how many games a restorer can do a year.

There are only a select handfull in this hobby that actually profit enough from it to make a living doing it. The parts businesses are more or less under an "all encompassing" service. Some guy/gal that lives in a remote part of the country is probably buying stuff from parts places left and right these days... even if they only have one or two games.

And most often with the pinball businesses that I encounter that are making some decent $, they also have other forms of income as well. They route games or are custom cabinet or furniture manufacturers, own a plating business, are artists that touchup/clear-coat on the side, or are in the automative painting business... A LOT of these people were professional artists long before they started making pins look new again.

I hate the car-gument but in this case, it's very similar. You can make a LOT more money as a certified diesel mechanic (per week) than you could ever make restoring classic muscle cars. There are exceptions to this rule (just like in pinball) but you would need some serious coin AND TALENT to start up a classic automative restoration business these days.

Pinball is a much smaller scale but no one just wakes up one day and decides to start restoring vintage arcade or pinball games for a living. You have to be passionate about it and not be all that concerned with the overall profit off any given machine, if you are doing things the right way.

talking from someone that has been restoring playfields professionally for 11 years. It's very unrewarding and if you figure out the time it takes, and the expenses. The hourly rate is lower than most of you could survive on.

The pros are shooting 2PAC paint that can be recoated/clearcoated in 12 minutes.

They are also often using brand new cabs made of MDO plywood. MDO has no grain or plugs to sand out or patch. It comes pre-primed, ready for paint.

MDO2 (resized).jpg

It's my beer money.

For all the time it's taken me lately to do a restoration partly due to time and other due to being more of a perfectionist I'd be losing money if I took a job

People that do a lot of them typically have several games they are working on at once. So one is waiting on parts, another is getting clear coated, another is in cabinet prep stage. So people that do it full time usually always have work to be done. So even though the restore took 8 weeks they might complete 4 games during that period. If you are making 2500 a game that's 5K a month which is 60K a year, well above the US average income. I don't think anyone is getting rich restoring games but if you are good at it you can definitely make some money at it and maybe make a living at it. You would have to love doing it though. Those numbers are also completely made up though, I do not know what restorers are making per game, $2500 is just a guess

well, doing just playfields, you don't get anywhere near $2500 a game, and still takes 8 weeks to do 4 games.

Cheap, good, fast.

Choose two.

I think HEP charges about $8K in labour, plus parts. So if he does 10 restores a year, he's making $80K gross.

However, there's probably less than ten restorers doing it for a living in the the US. Hell, maybe less than five, and they all live in the middle of nowhere where it's a lot less expensive to live.

In terms of HEP none of this is correct but I like the idea of it
Honestly *my* actual labor is about $6000 to $6500 unless there is something more involved and it includes materials like paint and clear sandpaper,etc so it is far less profitable than projected.
There is also equipment, maintenance ,taxes,insurance,permits,power ,bookkeeping and more all to be taken out or paid for by the labor charges.
It is not as profitable as it should be at all and getting worse as the cost of other things rise but I just like the freedom it affords me in my daily life.

Sorry, I was just quoting other threads. Glad you're willing to correct me!

No problem here. If I don't do it no one else will .

http://www.highendpins.com/pricing-services/

Are you at all considering training employees and being able to create bandwidth in stages of the restoration that require a bit less expertise? Moving machines around, shooting clear... Or is this not worth the management and administrative overhead?

Then you're not charging enough.

Depends on the beer and amount

I have tried different things over the years but the best way I find is just to do it all myself because there is always a bottleneck when it comes to doing the playfield and more involved cabinet painting .
Anyone can gut the games and many can put them back together but the other stuff takes much more time and talent so I typically end up overwhelmed with just that part if I try to do a production based set up.
My oldest son is 18 and getting pretty handy in some aspects though sone hopefully there is some future there.

I've seen Bryan drink. Trust me...whatever it is, he isn't charging enough.

Specializing helps. I do strictly cabinet restorations and over the course of a few years developed a work space and refined materials choices so that I can be working on 3 at a time. 90% of the cabs come to me stripped of all metal, I also made a turntable of sorts so I just spin a cab to work on different areas. I painted for over 15 yrs before starting on pin cabs so experimenting with what paint etc was a non-issue. I have a system for cutting stencils so that they are reusable for several jobs. It's like anything else put in the time and you'll figure it out.