Is this were I join the support group?

My name is John and I like fixing pinball machines
She beckons me to play but I must fix and clean
Then I move on to the next one.

I'm in the same position I like to buy and fix them alot but rarely play them unless friend who likes pinball come over. It often leaves me wondering if I should just sell off my collection. I never do but every once in a while I'll sell a bunch of games but more always seem to take there place.

I spend about 70% of the time fixing, cleaning and upgrading and 30% of the time playing. My wife and friends play a lot, that's good. And there is always that one LAST machine I absolutely need to have. I hate to sell them but every now and again I have to since I ran out of room.

I do a LOT of wanting, a solid amount of playing, and for now just a little owning. I've got about $50,000 in machines on a wish list but so far only have WoZRR. Planning to add Metallica in February and then figuring out the rest of this list from there. But I play a couple hours every day at the moment. I could see that switching to a couple hours 3-4 days a week but heck I like playing any time I get a chance.

Sometimes I turn them all on in the morning and never play a game then shut them off at night. My wife and kids will play them and I will think I should play a game, but I'm too busy being on pinside and searching for that next game. I also enjoy working on them,although I wish my skill level was a lot better. I have found it comes and goes in the amount of time I play. Right now I'm playing a lot more. Which makes me ask myself why have I not been playing more this is so much fun. I also have been looking at finding some land to one day put a building on to house my collection that doesn't seem to want to slow down. There is just so many great games, so what's a person to do. I also want to spend my retirement years doing complete restores, but that's still 15 years of hoarding away. I must feed the addiction 24 hrs. a day, I got it bad. So glad to know I'm not alone.

Its a wicked addiction.. they multiply like rabbits . I dig getting ones that are broken .. figuring out the issue and fixing.. but never selling. .. lol but man .checking craigslist. Reading all about new parts.. traveling to scope a game out.. haggling the price.. adjusting flippers..replacing the back box.. playing them until 4 am.. uy uy uy.. lol

I'm going to wait until someone else admits to licking lock down bars after a whiff of the air inside a new Stern. Madness i tells ya.

I tend to stick my chest out every time I dump out a filthy tank of solution from my ultrasonic.sm (resized).jpegYeah thats right I did that!

As the sun slowly into the western sky,The shimmer of its last gleaming light glistens upon the polished guide-rails of the days labor.There I think to myself............

For a lot of people the thrill of the hunt and finding the machines is where it's at, so they continue to search for and buy pins even though they're not playing them much. How much is one pin ever going to get played when it's in a collection of 20 or more?

I need about 19 more machines to reduce the wear on my 1 I put 400 3-ball games on my new machine in a week. I'm not sure I can technically call it "new" anymore.

For me, I definitely still play every day, but I go in binges, sometimes it's all fixing, sometimes it's all playing. Probably works out to 50/50. Definitely scour the ads within 1200 miles every day though, looking for a fairly priced TAF at any driveable distance or any other gem at a more reasonable driving distance.

Ok. Glad I am not alone. Good company Spock.

The thrill of the hunts, the "honeymoon" time period playing it, the modding to make it more entertaining to watch someone play and maybe even for the players too, gimmicks you can add, accessories to buy, then on to the next ... it hooked me in. Once my initial player thrill time dies down, I enjoy watching other people's (family and friends) fun and frustration playing the games. I always ask which one is their favorite and why. Their favorite is usually the ones with the most entertaining mods (or rule set mode shows), which fuels my fire more to do more mods of what they like.

All of the above (except I own a dog instead of a cat and no issues there). It refreshes your brain once absorbed into the pinball world - a welcome escape for a short while from time-to-time. I also like coming here to Pinside for help and to give help or advice when asked. I'd like to be more involved, but comments here suggest that you really can't be a operator for locations and make a good loving at it. I see that locally as arcades are selling off their pins for better profit while this market is currently up. That fuels me more to gather my favorite pins for my own personal arcade at home. My wife is a pin player addict, so that enables me ... maybe not a good thing, but if getting more pins and sprucing them up makes her happy, that feeds my addiction. I'm near my max with 5 pins ... maybe just one more.

Bought my first pin (White Water) when I was 23 and lived in a house with 3 other buddies. The central party house. The thing was going non stop!
Moved out of town on my own, still played it regularly for a few months, but then it just sat there. I was sad to see it sit, so I sold it. BAD IDEA.

2 months went buy before I picked up a SM and the same kind of thing happened.

I've convinced myself, my excuse, is that I need more variety than one pin, no matter what its rank is.

Keep ya posted on my latest excuse when I have 4 pins in the basement and continue to play pinball arcade on my ipad.

For whatever reason, many hobbies attract people who want to collect and hoard - but not really use the collectible item for its intended function. I find this really odd...but that's me...I consider myself a "functional collector". I don't want to collect something I don't actually use. Why buy games if you're not going to play them? Especially pinball machines, which are expensive and take up so much space. If you're lucky enough to have them - ENJOY the shit out of them!!!!!

I'm not sort of in the same boat Spock. When I started into this hobby with my first pin (st:tng) I played that game all the time for 2 years straight. Then came LOTR and I played both for awhile. Avatar LE was for my wife and I didn't really get into that. ToM I picked up out of verbal obligation. I say it at a guys place and said if he ever wanted to sell it, I would buy it. Well after we got back from a family vacation which emptied some of the coffers, a voicemail from the guy said he would sell it. Your word is your word

I *really* wanted a tron in 2011 but poured a bunch of money into a basement renovation and that went on hold until 2016 when I picked one up. A few months later, ST:Pro. Now I have 6 pins and I really am only playing 3. Tron, Lotr, St:tng in that order.

I enjoy sometimes just turning them all on for the light show and will sit down with a scotch just admiring the art, the colours and lights. On occasion I do play

mittens

I think I spend more time wanting or debating about which game could be next then playing. Also still waiting for the next big wow factor in a game or creativity in games to increase even more so there completely differnt than the 90 era famous games.

My pinball hobby time probably breaks down into something like this:

30% Research & Documentation
20% Hunting for games & Parts
40% Repairs, troubleshooting, restoration, and peripheral side projects
10% Actually playing

I tend not to think that much into the hobby.
I love all aspects of it!

I'm at the point where I have all the games I want. If something new came out that I'd just have to have then it would be a hard choice to determine which game I would let go to make room for it. From the WoZ on there has been nothing new out there to interest me so at this point I'm thinking the collection is complete, other then a Bigfoot...but that's wishful thinking. The basement is so full that if I want to keep a new game I have to get rid of something and that's pretty dang hard to do these days. Luckily I bought many of the games years ago for pennies on the dollars compared to nowadays. Now I feel its time to start doing playfield swaps as there is ten of those waiting to be done let alone the list of games that need to be just shopped. There's always something to do but at this point it's getting harder to get motivated to just getting started. Once I get started then I'm ok and putting a game in the shop is a great way to do that since I know the only way it will get it's way back out of the shop is to get it done and that means I HAVE to start on it.

John P. Dayhuff
Battle Creek, MI.
269-979-3836

You have an impressive collection. 74 pins. It must get to a point where the collection gets overwhelming. Wow, I can't even imagine.

I'm at the point where I equally enjoy playing, fixing, and listening to someone else play my machines.

I enjoy playing - I'm in a casual bi-weekly league - but my real passion is fixing and/or tinkering in general.

I'm with Rarehero - what's the point of a collectible you don't use. Like those guys who buy all those die-cast cars and other do-dads that just sit around and collect dust. Basically those people are dust collectors.

That said, once you're over a certain number it's unlikely you'll play every game on a regular basis. There's only so many hours in a day.

WOZ was one of the high points of seeing the hobby move forward in terms of technological innovation for me and I now get more satisfaction out of restoration work.

At this stage given what is mostly on offer in terms of new pinball machines from the main manufacturers, I would rather spend the outlay on finding used machines that are fixer uppers instead of a NIB machine with incomplete code and is covered in powdercoated trim with quality issues.

Seeing more of Dialed In gameplay as it evolves might change that though.

Lol, I thought this was going to be the Pinside version of "F*ck/Marry/Kill" where we would be listing games for each category.

We love playing our machines and I'm enjoying learning how to fix them as well. Now that I have a few pins of my own, I'm not really going crazy about getting the next one, although I do have 3-4 candidates in mind.

"Buy games you can fix, fix games you can buy."
- TBK

Meaning never go beyond your technical skills or income.
Simple rule of the hobby.

If you have more non-working machines that are projects than in you own in your "permanent collection", you have become a hoarder and have officially passed into Stage 3 of pinball collecting.
Generally most long term collectors have at least 1/5 of their total number of machines owned as projects, meaning if you own 10 machines, at least 2 are projects.
More than that are you are already well past the time you have to restore games, unless you are a business, retired, or financially independent.

I still play pinball daily, I just pick one and spend 10-15 minutes tops, then work on something, and go on my way.
No more than 2-4 hours a day, mostly on weekends, unless finishing a project.
The percentage of time is always slightly away from playing, and has been for over 20 years.

Don't start sleeping underneath them in you home, or bad things will start happening to your personal life.
Girlfriends don't like that kind of stuff.

I was at a person's place a few weeks ago .
No lie they must have over 500 pinball machines.. over 500. ...i would say closer to 600 but some were in there .. holy shit..

Great thread. I too enjoy the hunt, the good buy, the need to fix, restore and adjust. I have friends that are into HO trains, it takes months if not a few years to build the layout, then they play with it for a short period, tear it down and start building another layout. I have my keeper pins but I enjoy to buy right, restore and sell and repeat. Constantly looking at Pinside, Mr Pinball classifieds, ebay and craigslist. Playing them, maybe 10-15% of the time.

I actually love it all. My collection of pins goes up and down, currently I only have 1. I probably put a minimum of 25 games a week on it.

I used to be like this (fixing > playing) but then I filled in my gameroom with a big assortment of games and actually made it a nice comfortable place to be (painted, etc.) and I have done a LOT more playing in the past few months, and it's truly fantastic! I'm a "keep moving" kind of player, often times I play a game of one, then go to the next, and the next, and the next - or sometimes I play 10 games in a row on the same game if I feel like it or it's tempting.

I haven't done much deep fixing recently (yet still have fun with whipping out the soldering iron for medium-scale fixes that aren't game-breaking but are a missing feature per-se, that you can tend to when you want but still enjoy the game without it for the most part if you want) and it's nice to take a break from that. This is why I love EMs: Short, hard games and quick ball times. My favorite. It's so quick, it leaves no time for getting bored, and then after if you're bored with that you move on, if not, you can either play again or move on as well. I don't know if I could enjoy a collection of DMD games as much, they take too long due to many reasons. You can launch the ball and watch it roll around for two minutes. I think I would rather only have one or two DMD games (and could probably only afford that many, hah!) rather than a whole collection of them and spend more time on one game since they are so deep. If I had a collection full of newer games a lot of them would never get played either for this reason. There's simply too much choice.

Many deep DMD games = Too much

One or two deep DMD games = Perfect (to me)

One or two EM games (shallower than DMD) = Not enough!

Many shallow, challenging games with all of your challenges in sight = Super perfect (to me)

So, I'm happy with my EM paradise. You walk up, press start, and either let it kick your ass for a minute or two or have a great 15 minute long game. It's entirely what you make it - no fluff in between, nice and fast and you can either play again or play another game. A constant, fun battle that varies in challenge between titles.

It's a pure joy hobby. I like all parts of it. What I really enjoy is getting a game and getting it to play the way it did the day it left the factory. That always makes me feel good. Playing is more social now, but cleaning and repairs is something I enjoy helping others with.

Marc

What DMD games would these be?
There's not a lot of waiting for the ball with the DMD's I have.

In general. Surely it's all opinion. There's just a lot of video modes and DMD action where it holds the ball (like between modes and ball locks, etc.) and just ends up being a little too slow paced for me, as ironic I am sure that sounds to any DMD guy. Some EMs are quite fast!