WH2O. Not super complex but lots of mountain plastics and an upper playfield that are covered by many overlapping ramps.

It was my first machine and was a pain to fix up (also expensive), but now i feel like it can only get easier going forward

WCS94 is not too fun when it comes to pulling those 2 overlapping ramps. Cool design for ramps, just a pain to work on, LOL.

T3. Does every tiny rubber have to be such a damn tight fit?

Demo Man was pretty complex. Fortunately they explain the disassembly order in the manual. But even with that I had to do the ramps twice to get it all right.

Most SEGA games are a bitch, but Baywatch is the only one I actually stopped halfway through, because I didn't want to deal with it....

the Ramps on Dirty Harry can be confusing since they are interleaved ...

Stargate is the biggest PITA.

Safecracker has a reputation as being difficult to work on.

Earthshaker. Doing it right now....ramps galore, Loctited posts....ugh.

Getting ready to start a Dirty Harry teardown.It looks like it's going to be a big PITA but worth the time when done.I really like the game.

Pinball Magic was by far my biggest challenge. You definitely have to remove the playfield to do all the work on it with that weird CAPCOM playfield lift and it was ridiculous to take apart and put back together. One of those where you can't just take it apart section by section and take pictures. You have to take one half of a section apart and then to get that one screw etc you have to take another section half apart and then come back to it. Great machine though!

Pinball_Magic5_(resized).jpg

Yeah, these ramps were an absolute bear to work on.

Earthshaker was a major pain. Simply changing out a bulb or two under the left hand side of the playfield requires that the center ramp is removed, but you can't remove the center ramp without removing the VUK and fault assembly--which is fairly complex.

Baywatch

Funhouse is a bitch. Overlapping ramps AND you have to service the head as well (that didn't sound too good...).

Man, all of the system 3's are a bitch...big hurt, stargate, street fighter, barb wire, etc....my other most hated tear downs include, demo man, wcs, stern star trek.

TZ.

It's an engineering masterpiece, but when everything on it is broken it takes a lot of work to get back to 100%.

Wait, how? I've just stripped my Stargate down, and for being my first pin, it seems pretty easy. (Besides the loctite) Yeah, there are a few things that can't be reached easily, like how in order to change the rubbers under the pyramid, you need to remove the VUK wire form on the right, the pyramid plastic and door, and the glidercraft, but most of it seemed to come apart in pretty big chunks that were easy to keep track of

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-dirty-harry-club/page/9

Post #444

STNG....

I'd say either Black Hole (6 flippers, 6 pop bumpers, 2 playfields, multiple drop banks) or Haunted House (8 Flippers, 4 pops, 3 playfields, drop banks) would be the most brutal to shop!

STTNG, WH20, ES, WW, TZ, TSPP

These are very easy machines to shop out.

I second Big hurt and SF lol

Agreed. I shopped a Viper that took me two weeks to re-assemble and that was with reference photo's. I had to go look at another pinsiders machine to verify everything was correct.

Electra.

NBA Fastbreak.

TSPP, WH2O, WCS94, Godzilla, Baywatch, TZ, BoP, and a whole lot of Pat Lawlor games.

between pinside and RGP, this top has been hit many times. here is another thread from pinside.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/hardest-game-to-shop#post-1556386

RPG has a lot too.

Banzai Run

Grand Prix

IMG_0480_(resized).JPG

I guess I got lucky by jumping with both feet, in a sense, by my first pin being a TZ. Sure, it took a while to do and there was a lot to fix, but I feel like since I learned so much from doing all that work and NOT knowing that TZ was one of the harder machines to diagnose, work on, and fix, that now I can tackle just about anything.

Just about….

And there are new games too. Not that many of them make the list of hard to shop.

If you're going to require going through every switch in every relay to count as shopping, you should also require replacing every connector and socket, etc on modern machines. Both are rarely needed. Personally I don't think shopping should usually count anything not on the playfield, in which case every EM/single level game is a piece of cake

I have a White Water that I'm shopping right now. Other than all the interlacing ramps it's really not that bad to shop. Time consuming yes, but not difficult.

I had a NASCAR and removing the left and right ramp were a complete pain in the ass. To remove the right ramp, you had to remove the left one first which was easy enough, but then the right side wrapped behind the PF and was all one piece. I swear the ramp would be 6 feet long if you stretched it out straight.

My first pin and still a goodie was F-14 and getting under the diverter was/is a pain in the ass. You have to remove 4 habit trails, including the main one from the shoot lane just to get close to it. No wonder Yagov is so pissed all the time.

I think each pin has its difficulties. At least one section that is tricky.

Any pin I've had a few too many drinks disassembling. WW was most recent, still finding leftovers. Jkjk, just a nut or 10

Demo Man certainly sucked. Baywatch certainly sounds terrible!

IMG_0481_(resized).JPG

'Service suggestion - if unit becomes sluggish - disassemble, clean all parts and reassemble, lubricating as directed.'

They're all sluggish. They're all coated in 40 years of filth. The game doesn't work when they are sticky. FWIW, GP has twenty of them. The dis- and re-assembling aren't bad but all those grimy little bits get to be a drag.

- versus -

'There's six screws holding a ramp on, that I've gotta take off to get to the other ramp, that has six more screws...'

Safecracker isn't bad; I've had mine pretty-much fully apart.

So far one of the worst I've seen is Apollo 13 (Sega.) But the truth is that in the *modern* era there is no excuse for any of this. Back in the 1970s, 80 and maybe even early 90s there was *some* excuse, but today 3d CAD makes such nonsense utterly inexcusable and abusive. It has also been a major contributor to the "death of pinball" in terms of player satisfaction in commercial environments.

Interference checks are trivial to do with a 3dCAD system, and thus literally everything should be easily removable -- either individually or as an assembly. They're not, but it's not because they can't be, it's because the manufacturers don't spend the time or use 3dCAD. This in turn makes keeping the games working properly a five-alarm PITA, and THAT impacts route earnings (in a BIG and BAD way) because a game that isn't fun never gets the *second* stack of quarters from a player.

Some of the worst offenders are the habitrail ramps and subways; a subway that is of odd shape (and thus cannot be removed laterally; it has to come out perpendicular to the playfield) *and* is crossed by wire loom, frequently in more than one place, becomes a royal pain in the you-know-what to get off. If you can't get it off easily then you can't clean it. Closely followed by this is the never-ending use of shallow (due to playfield depth) wood screws (bad enough) that can of course strip or *stapled* down sockets. The latter might have been ok in the 1950s but couple that with a playfield that has to be basically stripped to get to some of the GI or controlled lights and you have a single bulb change that just turned into an hour-long (or more) project. And finally there is a special place in Hell for designers that nut an assembly together in a place that doesn't allow rational access with anything larger than the nut-driver, and where the assembly of parts makes likely the dropping of one or more small components (e.g. washers, nuts, etc) into inaccessible places. Yes, there are magnetic nutdrivers and I own 'em, but those are not an all-solved answer. One such dropped nut can force disassembly of a major part of the playfield to retrieve it, and you *have to* retrieve dropped metal lest it ultimately go somewhere that results in a short or significant mechanical damage.

Finally, what's with nobody (over how many decades now?) standardizing on some sort of connector system for leaf switches and similar? It's not like they're not in *every* machine. Put a pigtail on them if you want with some sort of Molex or similar with a consistent pin assignment for the grounded side and now playfield wiring and switch maintenance becomes really easy to deal with.

Expecting the average route monkey to deal with these sorts of things is unreasonable; he won't because he can't. And thus the game condition suffers..... something that collectors can deal with and, when we acquire a game can clean up, but for the commercial machine on a route? Nope.

Agree

Although I can certainly believe it, I can't think of any game that uses the score reels for anything beyond the match and replay levels. As long as the reels reset properly when you start a new game it won't care much if they're actually doing their job. I'd bet that if u unplugged the reels from my Surf Champ after resetting nothing would go wrong. Not that doing so would make much sense, but... I so buy your point that EMs are a but more interconnected than SS, but I think we have a different definition of 'shopping' in mind. If my EM can't start a game, or the outhole on an SS won't kick out, I consider fixing that a separate problem from shopping, which is mostly tearing down the playfield, cleaning everything is and putting it back together

Big Hurt was actually one of the first ones I did. It wasn't that bad. Dirty Harry and STTNG were a lot of work. But they are all easier than rebuilding a car.

In regards to EMS, I took a game with 12 score reels and several steppers (Lady Luck) and went thru every last one of them in one day before the sun went down and cleaned and adjusted quite a few switches to get it working 100%.

Stripping the playfield ,cleaning and waxing it, and rebuilding the flippers and putting it all back together should get done in less than three hours.

Games that need all the inserts removed and re-glued and leveled will take a bit longer.

When you spent your life repairing all different years, makes, and models of rolling shitboxes, working on pinballs becomes more of a leisure activity. I usually take my time with them, but when I'm feeling on a roll I just get down to business and get them done.