Hi.

Two can play this game! HELLO!

Have a Great Christmas & Happy and Safe New Year Colson. Any progress with your custom machine? I made good use of that backglass and it helped me save yet another machine.

Thanks,
Skip

Wow, last post there is 3 years ago... I guess some things never change.

You are sadly mistaken. its Jersey Tags every time i see a left lane DICK!

New York tags for people who use both lanes at the same time!

NY drivers don't know the meaning of lanes. It's a free for all. NJ/PA are much better.

Amen, brother. I hate 81. We live in the only pinball dead zone in PA, as well. Before my heart problems I was gonna open a barcade by the University of Scranton. I think something could do really well down there.

Halloween pin is moving a little slow...working on PF and cabinet artwork. I’ll have more time this winter. Have a good Christmas and New Year too Skip.

At least here in PA most people can stay between the lines. Sadly most people still don't know how to drive pretty much anywhere in the Northeast but Miami makes people here look like experts.

Colson,

It is always tough to find time to do your own stuff when you have a family. Enjoy Christmas with them - there will be plenty of time for pinball stuff once you little girl is all grown up but you will never get these years back again. I learned the hard way with my two boys. I was always too busy for family stuff when I was 'young and dumb' now I think back on how much I missed over the years and it makes me want to cry. On a positive note I have a great relationship with both of my boys and my two daughter-in-laws also so all is good in the end.

Later,
Skip

Pinball in PA in a nutshell.
Pa has several things going for it. Location, past operators, auctions, dealers and shows.

Location: Western PA guys (Pittsburgh area) can easily travel to OH, WV, IN, MI. Eastern PA (Phily, Allentown area) can travel to NY, NJ, MD, DE, CT, MA. ANd you have us Central PA guys that can easily connect the two sides of the state together and make day trips to WV, MD, VA, DC, southern NY, NJ, DE,

Past operators: PA has always ben a Mecca for operators. Back in the days we had arcades everywhere. It would be sae to say PA probably had more ops then any other state in the USA. Games in every place you could think of. If you think about it PA didn't have much going for it in the 80's for the youth to late teen group other then arcades. Another thing to keep in mind is many of these ops had access to hug warehouses so dead games would just be stored for decades. We also had Hershey Park throughout the 80's.

Auctions: We had many super auctions, arcade auctions and all those family owned amusement centers going out of business having auctions. Who remembers when Hershey Park used to have an auction to sell off all their older games at the end of the year?

Dealers like PA game-room warehouse in Lebanon and D&L Distributors. They always had a warehouse full of games and everything was for sale. Smaller dealers like TNT Amusements, MP Amusements and others.

Shows, events, Locations: PAPA, Pinburg, Pinfest and White Rose Gameroom show. Plus we are getting many more good locations.

In these parts, you always see idiots from Maryland doing 10 under in the passing lane. It's almost to a comical level.

You're absolutely right. I bought my WMS IJ from Lloyd in 2011 for $3,000. I still watch his facebook posts for deals as he's unloading trucks but you hardly see items that are bargains anymore.

And people are buying them the minute he posts them. He's basically printing money.

Gotta say I was impressed with Michigan drivers while I was there this summer. Seemed like no left lane hogs at all. Maybe it's because their cars aren't loaded down with pins like everyone in PA?

Lloyd has created the "perfect storm". When I first met Lloyd about 10 or 12 years ago I was impressed. He just seemed like a class act who worked his ass off to get where he was in life. The more I followed what Lloyd was doing the more I realized what a smart business man he was.

Now that he is collecting warehouses and filling them with machines while sell stuff faster then he can list it I am even more impressed.

Now for the negatives: I hate the fact he keeps shipping containers of machines out of the country taking them away from our local market. I hate the fact us locals can no longer buy from Lloyd because his prices are insane. And I hate the fact he is just basically a flipper.

In any event - like Disney - he has perfected the art of picking peoples pockets and having them say thank you. The reason I compare him to Disney is we just spent a couple weeks in Orlando and the Disney business model is insanely impressive. Charge people over $100 a day to get into a park to stand in line to pay almost $10 for a hot dog! Have people waiting in line for an hour or more to go on a ride that is basically advertising for Disney. And so on!

between the PAPA headquarters, Pinball PA in Hopewell township, and Dan's Pinball Perfection you have about 1000 playable machines at three locations within 15 miles of eachother in Pittsburgh. i live near chicago. were it not for family, i'd move to pittsburgh in a heartbeat.

I have a Night Rider that has a sticker on it that says...Property of Mello-Dee Music Co, Lebanon Pa. Anybody remember them? Must have been a operator/dealer.

Western PA has a ton of great sites, also home collections that will rival anywhere.

In most be doing something wrong. I'm in central PA and good deals just seem few and far between. The few I've seen get scarfed up and back on Facebook for 3x the original owners asking price within 24hrs.

And for the record very few pa drivers know what turn signals are.

That pretty much sums it up now a days. If its priced with any room to make a buck it's snatched by flippers in a couple minutes. But every now and then I still find a few.

I just watched an episode of Macgyver in which he was cruising through PA. He crashed his jeep but was rescued by the Amish. He then helped mend the hostility between the amish and the locals. I saw no pinball in the episode though

So, the moral of your story is stay out of Pa. cause there's no pinball here!!

We just got back from delivering a machine to HEP and I parked next to a pick up that had a front tag on it saying "IM 5ORRY" using the 5 instead of am S for the sorry. My wife loved it and told me I should see if that was taken here in PA. Kind of sums up my life for sure!

Funny story about the amish and pinball an em arcade if anybody is from Baltimore area you probably know about joppatown flea market for two years there was an arcade with mostly em arcade and pins in it with an amish market every time I would go down there amish kids playing pins shooting galleries games air hockey all over the place It just amazed me when is like 12 years old

Having grown up around the plain folk, this doesn't surprise me in the least. The back room of the little five & dime where I played pinball as a kid was often filled with teenage Mennonite boys, smoking cigarettes and playing Double Dragon. I was older before I found out that there are Pennsylvania Dutch curse words, some of which are fairly amusing when translated literally.

Up the road was a bar the Amish kids liked, they'd park their bicycles in the back and use that entrance so as not to be seen. On a hot summer afternoon you could usually find a few sitting in the shadows in the back of the bar with a pitcher of beer.

Poorly kept secrets at best, but in that culture they're expected to wild out a little before they join the church and get boring.