Entropy.

Pinball machines have tons of moving parts. Video games don't. I'm not even sure automobiles have more moving parts.

Also the averages automobile costs $32,000. I'm sure if pins were engineered with that price point in mind, they would be made of sturdier stuff.

Anything having a ball running around in it a few miles an hour will break sooner or later.

LTG : )™

These are electronics,with a steel ball traveling at 30-60+ mph.., with alot of them on 24 hrs. a day.
and most of the break-downs are machines that are 20-50 years old..
It's amazing they hold up as well as they do..!!

A pinball machine has more wiring than a car and therefore will break down more often.

Mechanical things break. Moving parts wear out. Mechanical action pinball has a steel ball propelled into other patrs (targets) which by definition alone will eventually result in component breakage or mis-adjustment.

Plus, it keeps service technicians and part suppliers making money.

That's a good point. One reason there's a lot of maintenance is because most of these things are over 20 years old. How reliable is a car built in the mid 90s today?

Especially if it's a Ford Taurus.

To the contrary had a machine over a decade just some lights, new rubber, and batteries. Car will have all those and you got oil changes to deal with. Rather reflow some solder if needed.

The problems are mostly on machines from early 90s and older. The later machines in the 90s are mostly value and mod talk. If you remove all the 'old' and the 'faulty' repairs these older machines will function essentially maintenance free for home use as long as you own it. When these were in use there was no real love for them by the operators. The products you mentioned are all new and people take care of them better then these were ever take in care of. A fair comparison is not to compare them to cars but to taxi cabs. Work for a cab company and you'll understand what abuse happens to modern products through penny pinching owners and the public just not caring since it is not 'theirs'.

Mike V.

I think a lot of breakdown issues are because people don't know how to - or don't take the time to - repair things correctly. I am not saying occasional breakdowns still will not happen but if someone good goes through a machine completely breakdowns shouldn't happen all that often.

For example with SS machine most people think board issues can be repaired by just installing a board and when a machine works after installing a new or rebuilt board they assume problems are all fixed. However - from our experience - there are actually more issues with connectors on harnesses than board issues on most machines. So re-seating the connector sometimes makes for a quick fix the only correct fix is to replace all contacts in a connector and re-pin a board if board isn't being replaced.

As far as mechanical parts breaking or bending you have to look at the cause of the issue and sometimes re-engineer a part or assembly to make things last. One thing that comes to mind as far as that goes is round targets. A piece of foam behind leaf switch will make target last much longer and machine play better. But most people don't take the minute it takes to cut a piece of foam and install it then they get upset when targets break.

If someone good goes through a machine most of the time you can get hundreds of plays one a machine without an issue. But so few people actually understand repairs (or correct repairs) and fix things the quick way most machines keep breaking down.

So bottom line is part of the problem is so many people just patching instead of repairing problems in the first place. On top of that most people install "better" new parts instead of using good used parts. In most cases good used parts will outlast new junk. I am not saying there are not some good vendors making parts these days but a new light bulb will not last like an older bulb did. As with anything being made today - quality just isn't what is was 20 or 30 years ago. I buy lots of new bulbs and normally put new bulbs in machines I am selling but I save the good used bulbs and use them in my personal machines because a 20 or 30 year old made in USA bulb will outlast a new made in China bulb 10 to 1.

So new parts & patching instead of fixing are at least part of the breakdown issues on most machines. We have machines in our collection that we went trough 3 years ago that we have never had to touch, as far as a repair goes, since we originally fixed them. And rarely have we ever fixed a machine that we had to go back and fix same issue again. Take the time to do things correctly the first time and you will spend more time play and less time fixing your machines!

nah, pinballs don't go faster than like 6 mph. see this thread: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/how-fast-does-a-pinball-travel

Even though they have a bunch of moving parts, high speed balls, etc., the quality of the machines really should be better by this point in their evolution. While the electronics have improved, the mechanical part has essentially been at a standstill for 20 years. I'll keep buying them, and enjoy fixing them, but the way that Stern engineers and assembles its pins leaves a lot to be desired. I was just telling my son tonight while fixing a 1 year old machine that someone who doesn't enjoy or know how to tinker should never own a pin. The quality of US cars sucked for a long time until they got a kick from the competition. There's nothing kicking Stern into upping its game when it comes to reliability, so they are rightfully focused on game design. It's working out pretty well for them so is smart business.

Because most games people own have 1000's of games played on them. These machines take a ton of abuse in their lifespan on location. Over all I think they are incredibly reliable, actually, compared to similarly used machines with so many interactive parts.

Take a pin and restore it to near new condition and in the home environment, most will be very reliable. Every machine eventually has something go wrong and need maintenance.

It teaches us to do repairs.
Many here had never done any electric or electronics work before owning a pin. Same can be said with mechanical repairs.
Pinball, fun and educational too.

Grab a screw driver, dive in, have fun.
Don't forget to turn off the game before you do.

Everything breaks especially electrical elements and moving parts throw a fast moving steel ball in the mix and 25 years of abuse and you get things that need adjusted or repaired. I think they do qwite well considering the circumstances

They are commercial machines, meant to be placed on location and serviced regularly. They were never meant to go in homes.

The reliability could easily be improved. However, it would add significantly to costs. NASA could build a self leveling, gravity defying pin that would work in zero G's, but they would cost $348,000,000.00 each. Is that what you want?

Well yes as long as Stern doesnt build and code it and jjp doesnt ship it. I keed I keed.

depends on the trim color...

also does that price include coin mechs?

Cos we break em. We don't mean to do it and they can be fixed.

Because we have just as much fixing them as we do playing! (well....perhaps not quite as much)

HA! NOT! I can feel my blood pressure instantly hike every time I want to play and all of a sudden there is a credit dot/issue.

There machines were designed to last about 5 years and then be tossed aside after they have made the operator some money.

I agree fully. It usually takes a lot of effort to redo the bad repairs too and you'd wish people would not mess with pinballs in that way. The repairs we have seen so far in the pinballs we bought, were sometimes hair raising.

the reset issues con be really annoying on williams games.
and the ball troughs are such a common area for problems.

because they are made by man. that is why i am afraid to get on airplanes now.

After owning my first machine for a few months now, I'm actually surprised they don't break more often.

When I got it, I striped it down and cleaned it. Fixed all the bad switches, and had to put in some locking nuts for the posts. But with a ball that heavy, it seems that some of the stuff should snap the first time it's hit. Like the three bank targets. The plastic disc just looks like after the first hit, it should be in several pieces.

What they said!
I was working on Black Rose pop bumpers last night. One of which had been repaired before. Glued together with some crap glue and the wrong screws used to attach cap. Well I reglued with Gorilla Glue and went to reattach but since the screws were to big one had broke the mount point piece. So I attached with one screw. 10 games later the whole cap broke off. Wrong screws are the reason!
Do it right or keep doing it over and over again !!

gorilla glue sucks for holding plastic together, in my experience. plus it expands like crazy when it dries.

I fix stuff for a living & always reply "what man makes.... breaks"

I'm sure it has something to do with the laws of thermo dynamics & weed but for now this is my theory.

ummmm no. 60mph is 88 feet/second. a PF is about 3 feet long (playable length). a ball does not take .03 seconds to get to the top.

Because you touch yourself at night.

pinball machines would have to come with helmets and body armor if that were true.

i'd love to see the glass or plastics that could stand up to a 1" steel ball hitting it at 60mph, though.

Pick up a standard pinball. Hold the ball at waist level. Drop the ball on your toe. Those little bastards are mini wrecking balls. I'm surprised anything plastic survives. Add in the heavy vibrations and the amount of wiring held together with tiny, ancient solder globs. I curse them when they break, but I don't have a hard time understanding how they done got broke.

It really is shocking how well they hold up all things considered. Think about turning on a personal computer with relative board set from 1988-1995 and how crappy and slow and unreliable it would be.

This sounds like a mythbusters episode in the making. We need to make a batch of ballistics gel, stat!

Man, 60mph, that's 1/10th the speed of a musket ball. Pinball machines would go from nerd activity to brutal sport instantly. Tournaments would be last man standing.

Some do, some don't. I have had a Taxi that has given me barely any trouble in the year and a half I have owned it, but that's a credit to my friend that did a fantastic job tuning it up before me.

agreed (other than the fact that the ball travels at less than 10 mph). if it traveled at 30 mph, you wouldn't have time to react.

at 30 mph, that means that the ball is traveling at 528 inches per second (63360 inches in a mile @ 30 mph = 1,900,800 iph [inches per hour], or 528 inches per second), the ball would travel the length of the playfield (42") in less than a 1/10th of a second (0.079 seconds)

This. We are desperately trying to keep machines running that are approaching 2x-7x of their design life.

In order of significance:

1. Vibration - Kinetic energy in and around the game causing things to move, a result of the ball flying around hitting things, creating dust, breaking things, moving a game, connectors becoming loose, inertia/impact from solenoid firing, contacts and wires breaking off, etc.

2. Moving parts - things that are moving are exponentially-more-prone to breaking down than non-moving parts.. friction causes heat and degradation of parts.

3. Age - parts become less-efficient and weaker over time (metal fatigues, plastic becomes brittle, heat from lamps causes things to dry up, capacitors evaporate, batteries leak, etc.)

4. Environment - temperature/humidity changes, dust, hair, spilled drinks, and other environmental things cause stress in parts and corrosion on electrical contacts, UV rays from the sun will fade artwork, etc.

5. Poor Design - some mechanical and electrical designs may have faults that cause unreliable behavior (insufficient connector designs can cause overheating, poor playfield design can cause ball hang-ups, bad mechanical engineering can result in parts that break too easily or often, poor circuit/software design can cause erratic game behavior/resets, etc.)

Not even close. A car's engine harness alone has more wiring. Throw in the body harness of a modern car and you'd be surprised how much wiring is packed into your ride.

Shouldn't say this, but my PotC 7 years old I never had to open the machine, one light did burn out and the rubber was less than new but mechanically it's been A1. I did replace all the rubber a year ago.

Gary Stern is now registering a Pinside account to respond.

Then pick it up and drop it 999 more times on your toe.

Best response ever

If it has tits or wheels it's gonna give you problems and most pinballs have both.

6. Care from previous owner(s) - You cannot forget the human factor!!! Previous owners that didn't know what they were doing (or didn't care) about the game(s) in their possession. Taking shortcuts while on route in order to get a game running ( i.e using a higher rated fuse(s), crazy-gluing plastics, non-spec coil usage, yadda x3). Trying a modification that doesn't work (OUCH!)....these and other things that could limit the damage to a game.

The ladies might also chime in "Don't forget balls!!!"