People would have said the same thing 20 years ago, yet here we are. I'll still care about pinball in 20 years.

Wow Chris. Looks fantastic. Thanks for taking the time to show all of your progress. You sure can tell you put so much time and effort into your work.

Beautiful as always, nice TZ in the background too.

That TZ in the back ground does not look as good as my TZ.

Maybe not...yet.

Huh..

I really like that purple Seance insert.

Very Nice!

I seriously and honestly doubt both of these statements will ever happen. Twenty years ago, the same could've easily been said(and probably was by many ops who simply threw away their old TAF's after they tripled their money on them) and yet here we are. When all EM's are worth less than $50, then your statement might hold some future truth. But when there are EM's worth thousands of dollars to this day(let alone the DMD games that are in the tens of thousands), trying to predict the future collectibility and rarity of the most popular pinball machine ever made(TAF), is an exercise in futility.

I can further speak from personal experience in my other collector hobbies where 100% factory accurate restorations of one-of-a-kind prototypes demand the most attention, the most prestige, and the most money, that your statements are ungrounded and will prove to be false. I don't think pinball is any different. Sure, the commodity might be different, but the situations surrounding it is exactly the same.

Furthermore, with Mr. Lawlor's new info regarding this particular machine's unique history, and Chris' documentation of the state of this game pre-restore, if in 20 years someone saw fit to restore it to reflect the way it looked with the hand-rubbed inserts, they could do it and make it extremely accurate. But, there's no escaping the fact that original stuff is gone forever. I think that's all some are trying to say.

And none of this is to knock Chris' work either. We all know his stuff is pretty much the gold standard for restorations. Well, him and Bryan Kelley and Jim McCune... I DREAM of having my pins restored by one of those guys someday!

"All we are is dust in the wind"..........Markets come and go. 20 years ago I would not have said pinball was going to die in 20 years, but I will gladly say it now. I am not saying that you or I are going to forget about pinball, but for a very large majority of the population it will be completely dead. We are already there, you are just fooling yourself. I am fine with being dust.......

Nice Job!

Oh I agree we're already at that point. Our social footprint is minuscule at best. We're a VERY niche market, but we'll be here for a long time to come. One of my other main hobbies is with classic Mustangs. It's a safe bet that most people under 20 don't know that Ford made Mustangs in the 60's.

Hell, half of those kids don't even know how many states there are in the country....

HOW did i miss this? Pat Lawlor chiming in on your restore!!!!!!

He seemed upset about what you did there, but i agree with you that had you known that Pat HIMSELF applied those decals, things would have been a little different. Its still an amazing restoration and as a pinball fanatic, id rather have the game preserved in the way you did it than just rusting away. It can be played for years to come, the way it was meant to be. HOW did i miss this post for so long?

(If it really was Pat Lawlor..... THANK you for Whirlwind its my first love!)

Its art, and everyone's a critic.
Nicely done.

Wow.... Dug waaaay down for this one!

Just a note in case anyone still cares about such things, but there *is* another proto playfield with hand lettering. I have it.

That said, well, we may have done a bad thing on this one, too. I acquired *just* a wired mostly complete proto playfield, but the rest of the game was missing (no idea how that happened). The playfield is VERY beat up on the top side, but the hand lettered inserts are still there. I wanted to save it as best I could, but I just couldn't see playing it more like that.

So I bought ANOTHER TAF that was REALLY beat to shit. I mean the cabinet was bad and it was BLOWN OUT. Chris bought a new cabinet and a new playfield and I had pretty much all new topside parts already anyway. So he took the proto parts off the proto playfield and put them all on a new playfield and nearly built a new game otherwise. So all the red boards and hand made weldments and so forth are in there, but the game is pretty much new otherwise.

And I still have the playfield. I also still have enough parts from the donor game and spares to rebuild it complete enough to make wall art out of. That's always been the plan, I've just never gotten around to it.

I'm not sure what I'd do if I had it to do again. I'm pretty sure I'd look at that playfield and still not want to actually further play it. I really don't think there's any way to protect it from further damage (when stuff starts flaking and peeling...) and not much you can do to make that mylar not look beat to hell, either. So it really shouldn't be played more if it is to be preserved.

If I want to ever get it put together, I should probably take it to Chris when I pick up my next game, though.

--Donnie