Hello everyone!
I'm new to pinball and am now the owner of my first machine.
And I have the bug!
Of course, growing up in the late 70's / early 80's pinball was such a huge part of our recreation that I always thought and dreamed of owning my own machine.
Fast forward about 40 years and I have one!
This is a cool forum as it's been great to see all the other stories, machines, projects and LEARN a lot about how these machines work.
And, of course, how to fix me up!
And that's where my little post here comes in.
So I wasn't even really looking for a pinball machine and really had no idea about what kind of machine I would want or what to look for when purchasing.
So basically a dumb newbie!
Anyway, an email I get from a local auction house that usually has restaurant or industrial equipment featured actually had an auction a few months back with some arcade equipment. I thought this could be interesting so I browsed the listings. Most of the items were non working driving games from the past couple decades, but there was one pinball machine! A Sinbad from Gottlieb!
The description on it said "lights up, needs work" and that's it. The photos were a couple exterior shots and it looked pretty clean. Of course knowing what I know now I would have asked or wanted to see in the backbox, the cabinet and playfield close ups, but I didn't know what I was doing! LOL!
All I knew was that there was a pinball machine that looked cool at a local auction. So I checked in with the boss and mentioned to her that "hey I got a birthday coming up and you want to know what to get me, so.....". Well she took one look at the photos and told me to go for it!
I mean, these old pins look amazing! What color! What graphics! So with her support I submitted a bid.
I ended up winning at $425.
At the time I thought I did well. Well, here's where I think the learning process begins!
Once we got there to load it up I first saw why it "needs work": an absolutely empty backbox! No power supply board, no display board...nothing! Fortunately everything else is there, but it looks like I'll be learning a lot about how these machines work (and spending a lot of time reading about Gottlieb System 1's!).
Of course once I got the machine home and could spend some time looking it over the list of things to fix started to grow.
I'll mainly focuse in the playfield as that's the most time consuming, but I also had to de-rust the legs, get new bolts for the legs (only had 1 bolt for each leg), rebuild all flippers, rebuild pop-bumpers, remove some creatures nest from the drop-target box on the underside, order new rubber, fuses and LEDs.
Oh yeah, and while the flaking on the backglass wasn't terrible, I did find an almost perfect back glass from Johns Jukes that will replace the original.
And I can't forget...ordered a P1-4x from Pascal for when it's all ready to go back together.
But that day is still in the future. Marco specialties and others have been getting a lot of orders from me and my little $425 "deal" is now at least twice that.
For a Sinbad? That's probably a terrible investment, but it's more a personal pride thing now and must be seen through.
Before I go, I'll mention the obvious that vid1900 's extended mega post on playfield Restoration has been like nightly reading for the past two months! I only hope that in the end what I create is at least of passing quality!