There are a lot of sheet metal shops for HVAC around. I would think they could make a door easy peasy. Shipping it might be costly as it's a odd sized item.

Doesn't PBR sell them?

Still perplexed as to how they go missing...

Yes, PBR does have some. Also there was a guy in the midwest a few years back (name escapes me)that was selling them through his site and on Ebay was reasonable and hooked me up with a two player Gottlieb that was not available thru PBR.

Bob

There is shop just south of 285 off of Peachtree industrial that did one for me for $45. They said they could easily fab the channels too. There name is Ellison Manufacturing.

Why back doors go missing? Easy .. the locks usually get messed with and the door doesn't stay closed. They then sit behind the pinball machine. Somebody who doesn't know anything about a pinball machine moves it .. finds the door .. wonders what's this and promply throws it away.

Mike V

Much of the time when an old machine was being pulled from the location it was being sent to a warehouse or possibly soon to a dumpster. The machine might even have been abandoned, key missing ...

The easiest way to open that back door to get to the head bolts for removal was to stick a screw driver between the wood and the plate above the lock and simply pry it up so cam (the little moving plate on the lock) bends out. From there it rarely stays with the machine.

Take a look at you machine for signs of prying.

They also used to pry the corner out to get to the credit wheel on location, those doors typically get dumped.

Are you talking about Jeff Kasten? Below is a link to his site, but I think he's hard to reach these days.

http://www.everythingpinball.com/pinball-parts

It is the evil back door troll. He lives under a bridge in Chicago, Illinois, under the old Gottlieb factory. Some say all missing back doors end up there.

mine is 1/2" plywood, which I actually prefer. cuts down on the noise from the backbox way more. Makes me want to convert all of mine to plywood. they actually attached a open ended screw to it as well with a hole in the plywood. Then use a butterfly wingnut to open and close it.

Why, and then again why? I drove way out in PA for a game I won on eBay. The last of seven photos clearly showed a back door on the game. When I got there to pick it up, the door was missing. The guy said the last guy who showed up to buy games from him must have stolen it! Not an easy one to find either; '60s Bally multi-player. Went back and forth with the guy for months before he finally agreed to send me $25. I figure I can get one made for that.
But lately, it's lockdown bars with me. They're either missing or the wrong one.

I have the Star-Jet back door! It is in the most beautiful original shape I have ever seen for a back door. A tad ironic, but still cool to have.

Yeah, but now you just need the rest of the cabinet, right?

Haha, yes! Hopefully soon I will have one built (or found!). I want it for Pinfest very badly. I guess we'll see...

We better get a local news reporter on it, someone call Carl Kolchak down at the INS.

ron-carl-tony (resized).jpg

I am a guilty party of doing that trick only occasionally when we ran out of coin - Williams 4 player games were the easiest; a lot of gottlieb's had a metal plate protector so you couldn't get to the credit wheel with a hangar wire.

Used for fixing old leaking furnace plenums, or just sold for scrap?

I figured a lot of back doors around here are wide open because of all the NIB price increases.

Fred Flintstone has holes where his floorboards should be but not us so we steal the backbox doors for rust repairs....

Why not get a HF brake and make your own.
Plywood as previously mentioned is perfectly fine unless your a purist , plus no rattle.

At least if a wedgehead back door is missing, PBR can sell you a repro. Mr. Young doesn't carry the multiplayers...I got very lucky in Allentown this year and found an original two-player door for my Solar City among the twenty or thirty of varying sizes leaning against the far wall of the indoor swap area. There is an ebay seller, I think it is the "Jeff" mentioned above, that has single, 2- and 4-player doors available once and a while, but communication is hit or miss and he hasn't listed them in quite some time.

I'm also on board with the frustration of missing lockdowns...they were missing on the last three project machines that came in the door...

I've tried in vain to get PBR to reproduce the lockdown bars. The story is that it took four dies to make those bars, and somewhere down the line one got lost. As a result, Steve was adapting NOS bars and when he ran out of those, that was it for Gottlieb lockdown bars of both varieties. They claim it's not feasible to remake the fourth die. Given what those bars sell for an Fleabay, I don't understand that. You'd think someone would step up and make them, but so far, nothing. I don't understand it, because they reproduce the siderails, but not the lockdown bar. The siderails are generally on the game and you can, most of the time, get them looking decent enough. But the lockdown bars sometimes take a walk and then you're left to try and find one elsewhere.

Fortunately, if you need one for a Williams EM, Marco can fix you up.

I had 4 made at a local HVAC sheetmetal shop a couple of years ago. They were around $30 a piece. I gave them an original door to use as a sample part to duplicate.

They are big heavy pieces that are easy to lose. And yes it's a royal pain in the ass because there are probably a dozen different ones for various EM games.

Someone told me once that if operators DID release a game into private use, they would always keep the back door so the game wouldn't end up at a competing location. I'd put that in the "old operator tales" file.

The first pinball machine that I ever bought was missing the backbox door. I asked the guy if he had it when I went to pick the machine up--the machine was left in the basement by the previous homeowner. When I described what it looked like, he promptly went into the mechanical room and came out with it. He said, "I figured this was part of the furnace."

Glad I asked.

That was probably 4kazman (John K I think) on ebay out of Minnesota. I bought a couple doors from him too - good seller. He hasn't had anything listed for awhile. Dirtflipper said he used to advertise his doors on CL too when he had them on ebay.

This might be what happened to the backdoor of your pinball machine. Check back after winter.

_sled (resized).jpg

_sled2 (resized).jpg

Hey thats my pizza pan!

Never heard this one, the operator would not be in business very long!

I just made my own out of plywood.

You ain't gonna get them 'cause I got them!