Tell us your stories, good and bad, of service calls. I’ll start:
I posted an ad on CL a few months ago looking to buy a pin project. I got a reply from a guy saying he had two old non-working machines, and that if I could fix one of his machines he would give me the other one. He said the game he wanted fixed had a bad flipper. The game he would give me was manufactured by Game Plan. I looked it up (had never heard of Game Plan before) but figured it was worth a few hundred dollars, non-working, so what the heck.
I had never gone on a service call. My experience is only working on my own projects. But the guy was local, so I went over to see the games and diagnose the problem. Was there for 2 hours. The guy talked a lot, and I gave him lots of info on pins and websites for parts. Checking out the flippers, they worked fine. The problem was a locked on solenoid. That turned out to be a bad solenoid driver board (SDB). So I told him I thought I could fix the board rather than buying a new one. He also wanted new rubbers which he would buy if I would install. I agreed.
Two weeks later he had the new rubbers in hand and I had the repaired SDB. Made an appointment to put his machine back together, and brought my son along to help load out the machine he was to give me. As soon as I walked in the door he hands me a piece of paper, an eBay ad, showing the game he was giving me for sale at $3,000. I told him….that’s not a sold price, but someones ridiculous asking price…..but I knew where he was going with this. I installed the SDB and problem fixed. He asked me to wax the play field before I installed his new rubbers and I did. Checked all the switches and solenoids and all worked fine. Then the guy looks at the play field and says there are 4 lamps that aren’t working. I jiggled them and 3 out of the 4 came to life. One didn’t, and a few others weren’t as bright as the others. He says….well, the game isn’t fixed, and that was the deal. Now he confirmed my suspicions, he wasn’t going to give me a $3,000 game for the repairs I did.
I told him his game was fixed and he could enjoy it once again….burned out lamp or not. He asked me what I wanted for my work, and figured something is better than nothing. I said 200….he quickly paid and I was out of there. Lesson learned….I will never do another house call.