Always conduct business in a businesslike manner.
ALWAYS
A handshake business deal is a ticking bomb.
If your sister borrows $500 from you, get an signed IOU. If she doesn't like it, too bad.
Save yourself a lot of heartache.
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Quoted from Colsond3:Oh Christ...thread's gonna turn in a errr.... positive direction now.
grow up
Quoted from davebart5:This is literally the dichotomy of Pinball for me and my hesitation to go deeper in the hobby financially.
Actions and reactions by Nifty are what scares me to get deeper into this hobby with hiring ‘professionals’ to help, or buying expensive items from start-up companies like this. Very scary stuff with businesses like Nifty out there.
Then you have the reactions from the very small Pinball community and it restores my faith in the hobby that people are looking out for each other, and willing to go to bat for someone they don’t know when it’s clear something foul is happening.
Despite situations like this, and several other high profile cases of fraud, I’m going to side with the good nature of the hobbyists in this community and PLAY ON!
Every hobby has bad repairmen and bad dealers.
Quoted from AdamPinball:"If this were me, you'd have a baseball bat crammed up your a$$ yesterday."
"This dude is a [comment removed]"
" i cant wait to point out to all pinheads who attend these shows what a douche bag company they are."
"burn him in court for every penny you can get."
"Comet. Cheap & they have great LEDS and run by a pinsider whom isn't a piece of shit."
"California here we come! Boy is it gonna be a shitty Valentine's Day for you when we get there Nifty."
"This has been quite the roller coaster. 10/10 fantastic"
"U-Haul rental and a couple of thugs - get going!"
"I guess that happens when you see someone younger than you with a nicer home, a bulldog, two Porsches, a 70 inch 4k screen, three pinball machines, and whatever else you were drooling over."
sigh.
Some "community" this is. I don't know what it is about pinball but it seems like its always a matter of time before the "community" decides to eat another one of its own.
It is quite obvious that many of us are just here to watch someone get destroyed. We wont be happy until someone gets humiliated, and put to shame at the feet of the "community".
"Pass the popcorn" am I right?
I read post after post of how this is entertaining and how much fun this is, "1 THOUSAND posts by Christmas!". Embarrassing.
Some of these posts have been downright violent, malicious, hateful, and vindictive. Written by people who have nothing to do with this situation and met with no resistance or condemnation by this so-called "community". But hey, its entertaining right?
Yea, I get it. NiftyLED screwed the pooch here. Daniel had no right to put the machine up for sale. They made a mistake, a big one and while Sticky doesn't come across as a wonderful person himself only a fool would say he has no right to be angry. So, what should we do here? As the pinball community, how should we handle this? Is the answer really to destroy NiftyLED? To burn their business to the ground and label them as "scammers"? Are we really happy with completely throwing them out of the pinball world, excommunicating them from anything to do with the hobby? Should we ban them from expos? Destroy their business relationships? Is that what we do to people now just because they did not meet your standard of groveling after what is arguably their first real complaint? What about those they associate with like The Pinball Podcast and Chicago Gaming Company? Should we boycott and tear them down too?FULL DISCLOSURE (before someone attributes bad motives to me for hiding something): I do know Nate and Daniel both personally and consider them to be friends (I am the fat guy in the picture on page 1). I do not know Joseph but I am sure he is a nice enough guy when he doesn't feel like he's being screwed. There, now you can all throw out everything I said above and get back to your popcorn.
You make some good points but Nifty made himself look like crap in this thread.
I work in heavy construction, and as you can imagine there are plenty of disputes and lawsuits. It seems to me that doing business in this sloppy way is bound to cause disagreements. The vendor should have a detailed itemized cost list for the buyer to sign off on and it should be updated as needed prior to the work being done. You have to have a detailed scope of work and an easy-to-understand fee proposal.
Also, he was a flat out idiot for engaging in back and forth in this thread. He made himself look like a jerk and he turned the thread into highly entertaining 22 page soap opera.
He should have simply written, "I'm sorry this whole thing got so messed up, call me and we'll straighten it all out." And that's it.
I think fair price of the work would be the original agreed upon price of $1800 plus any parts that were not included in the original $1800 quote.
That's how I would resolve it if I was friends with both of them.
The repairer would eat the cost of his labor above the $1800 for being a dumb ass and exceeding the original quote, but he would get paid for the extra parts.
As far as the value of the game goes, what's the high end retail on a sort of restored Playboy? $3000 maybe?
The value of the thing is not the amount of money that went into a restoration, it's how much money a buyer will give you. As you already know.
Quoted from Edenecho:Lol yeah no, imo thats a stupid saying. There is a median somewhere for what a machine is worth, and if 1 f***er is insane and pays an insane amount for a game that does not fall under "worth what someone want to pay for it".
I agree with you 100%.
I meant to say that the game is worth what the market will pay.
Anything common like a Playboy pinball is going to have enough sales data for you to generate a rough range of prices that it's currently changing hands at.
When you ask how much a 1965 Mustang or a 1978 telecaster or whatever is worth, some guy will always chime in with "It's worth what you are willing to pay." It's a dumb, pointless statement.
Once this dispute turned into a complete disaster on pinside, the vendor did massive public relations damage control and gave the job away for free.
Now everyone is happy and charmed.
Maybe it's because I work in construction, so I have a different perspective, I'm more fatigued with dealing with this kind of crap.
Let me give you guys a piece of golden advice:
There is no contract that can ever take the place of an honest agreement between two honest people.
How much is a really nice bally playboy worth?
I don't mean how much are dealers asking, I mean how much would YOU have to spend to get a really nice example?
$2000 maybe? $2500?
You don't automatically get back the money you dumped into a beat up game.
Many a man has bought a project and ended up dumping 2X or 3X the repair cost into it than it is worth when he's done.
Quoted from EricHadley:YEP, I put so much in my TAF you'd vomit....But it is a beauty and staying for a long long time
I met college kid recently and he said he was going to buy a "project" porsche 911.
Buying any project car is a black hole that sucks up money but you can just imagine what a project porsche 911 would be like.
So I said, "Listen, I don't like to give out unsolicited advice, but before you buy that car you need to do a very careful assessment of the cost to restore it and then triple the estimate."
He probably ignored me, there are some bitter lessons you can only learn by doing.
Quoted from bam10:I think any project is going to leave you upside down, even if you don’t count your labor as a cost. If you pay for labor then you will be way over the value.
It depends. You would be right 95% of the time.
But sometimes an item will look really nasty and not work, and all it really needs is a good cleaning and a little TLC.
I bought a "dead" asteroids game back to life by hooking a loose wire back on the interlock switch.
A couple hours with windex and 409 turned it into a showpiece.
Quoted from arcademojo:Yeah sooo true. Reminds me of the 56 Chevy I bought many, many moons ago. It was someones project that the guy held onto for his lifetime. And I really mean his lifetime. It was sold several times since his passing. Each new owner putting more money into it and then realizing they couldn't finish and sold it for a loss just to get rid of it. By the time I got it, it had all NOS chrome and new interior. Disassembled motor and trany. All the parts still in boxes. The new parts took up as much room as the car. I got the car for a fire sale price then put it in storage until the Carlisle Pa auto show came up the following year. Sold it right away for a nice profit.
That's awesome.
That could be a good retirement business. Buy project cars right when the poor bastard is sick to death of it.
Quoted from vwallat99:Wow what a thread. I think the people that flamed the good folks on pinside for adding drama into this should be ashamed of themselves. If it wasn't for this community helping out one another this would have been drastically different. Everyone that helped out earlier in this thread should be proud for stepping in. You don't usually get good endings on situations like these and gotta say pinside had a major influence.
I agree.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
My wife told me that when she was a kid and her parents gave her some quarters for the arcade, she would play the Playboy pin because she figured it was a "girl's game".
Because it had girls on it and not dumb boy stuff like cars or space ships.
Quoted from o-din:These statements always crack me up. My Skateball, Flash Gordon, and Stars play as fast or faster and less clunky than any Space Shuttle I ever played.
You guys love to pick everything apart and sharpshoot.
Show me where I said,
"I played every EM game ever made and compared them all to Space Shuttle and found them all to be slower playing than Space Shuttle.
Also, I'm the greatest expert ever on pinball and everything I write is the final word on all things pinball, no further discussion is allowed or useful."
Lacking those statements, my previously stated opinion is not crack-up worthy. It was actually a pretty bland and subjective opinion.
Anyway, I'm sorry I said that EMs played too slow for my taste and that my earliest pinball that I liked was Space Shuttle.
Those words are so absurd that they are a laugh riot. Thank heavens that someone was brave and hearty enough to point out the total wrongness of it.
Keep up the good work, guys. If you don't continuously hector and correct each other, the world will explode in a radioactive fireball.
Quoted from Who-Dey:You're definitely an expert on clown puking or rainbow puking pinball machines....whatever it is that you call it.
Oh dear.
I'm wrong again.
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