I can appreciate you goal of spreading the love for pinball, but you are likely generating revenue for the event and should not be subsidizing it with your labor and costs for the promoters and other venders profit unless they are a group you want to subsidize.

The whole collection seems like a lot of work. Sometimes less is more. 5 or 10 machines seems like plenty. Spend the time to really bullet proof a few pins so they will survive all of that use. No need to potential future pin enthusiasts to think that pinball machines are always broken.

Get them to buy you an insurance policy if anyone gets hurt involving your machines that covers you and your machines.

Get some coin mechs into your machines and figure out where to get a change machine to put next to your machines so you can make some money.

Put some for sale signs on the pins you want to sell for rates you would be happy to sell the pins for. At the very least putting on a high price may keep some people from beating the hell out of your pins, compared to if they thought the pins were only worth a couple of hundred dollars.

Let us all know how it works out.

One of the main reasons I would not want the pins set on free play is that many (most) of the people will walk up and jamb the start button a bunch of times. All of the pins will have a four player game started on it with people walking away halfway through the games and next person is left with a mess.

We have all seen this a pinball shows. At least at the show most of the attendees won't press that start button a bunch of times. But still it happens on a few pins and with ball save timers it can be a frustrating experience trying to clear out a four player game that is only halfway through.