I am reminded of the time I brought my HOU IM home, and seemingly within hours I was tearing ramps off to help replace the decent black rubbers with spiffy white ones. Given that was my most expensive pinball purchase to date it took a bit of confidence (crazyness?) to immediately start tearing down a multi-thousand dolllar purchase.

BUT my pinball hobby has given me the skills (and tool collection) to repair lots of other things around the house. What are some of your highlights?

Within the last 6 weeks or so I solved an intermittent headlight issue on my Infiniti. After looking into it online, there was a suggestion to dig a plastic box out from the engine bay and have a look at the circuit board inside for broken solder traces.

Sure enough, there was a mix of ~2 obviously blown solder joints, 2 ones that could be on their way out, and to micro cracks that I could only see with my magnifying glass. Out comes my trusty pinball solder station and voila... fixed my headlights (fingers crossed... I have had zero problems since : ).

What non-pinball stuff around the house has pinball given you the super hero skills to fix?

Neat (surprising!) responses so far!

I dug into my bottom mount refrigerator in the last few months (2x) to try to fix an icing issue. I think it ended up being a clogged water drain (meant to let water flow after the heating element/thawing cycle) AND an issue caused by when one of our fridge magnets fell and kept the freezer a teeny bit unseeled (leading to ice buildup).

I ended up saving hundreds in repair bills and honestly probably would have bought a new fridge once it iced up again ('cause its broken and I don't want to spend hundreds more to fix it if will only stay fixed a few weeks).

I don`t think I would have learned the skills and had the confidence to tear that apart without my pinball experiences.

Go team pinball hero!

Awesome, I sold my DLP ~6 years ago when the bulb was going... but it was "only" a 50" set so I was wanting to move up to 60" anyways. It was a good set and interesting technology; congrats on THAT repair.

Even getting the parts would have caused many people to turn away .

I replaced two bathroom fans ~2 years ago (fan/motor part only) and got away with "modifying" the existing housings to fit the new components. Again... pinball inspired.

And about a month ago I replaced my range hood fan motor with a new one. Kids stuff for a hardened pinball repair nerd .

Hardest part was tracking down the right part for a not-insane price.

Plumbing was something I always thought would be hard to self teach, and the punishment for screwing up so severe (e.g. lookee here, I just flooded my house cause that thing I thought was tight loosened and...) it was something I avoided.

There are still some things I will call a plumber for (installing a hot water tank, fixing a leak on a major water line etc.) but I have become better at replacing components. E.g. I had to do the shower hot/cold water (tap on/off) cartridge 2x in the last year, one for each of our bathrooms.

I am not sure I would have been able to do that as easily pre-pinball, though all these repairs do start to snowball in terms of my comfort level as the years have gone on.

Yikes, I know that is what those bulbs cost but that does tend to add up. I have been tempted to get a new TV, and was waiting for OLEDs to become more affordable. Hopefully the burn-in "scares" and some other early issues get worked out and I can pick up a nice set in ~2-3 years. If not LED lit LCD it is, fine.

I appreciate self lit technologies (even plasma "back in the day"), I just don't want to have to police our main set and get worried every time one of the kids or my wife leaves something on pause and wanders away for hours .

From the responses so far it sounds like pinside might get an appliance repair and plumbing issue subforum

And FWIW I had my bottom mount freezer fully disassembled in ~ an hour, hour and a half, but that was with figuring out how to even diassemble a few key pieces. I managed to learn a few things during reassembly, but now I am an expert . Or at least it is running well, until the next time it breaks (hopefully years from now).

I wondered when the first "story of regret" was going to show up

Wow; lucky me, so far I haven't had to explore this... were the phones powered on when they became wet?

That's awesome; pure pinball skill. And one thing I have never dove into (EPROM burning).

Yikes; I am not sure how you did that (some sort of rigid backing material that you had to slide off once it was on the pool table or ?