They were a fabulous run of games for sure. Some of the metal flippers were red.

My Trade Winds is one of the early production ones issued, so it uses the same cabinet as earlier games like Jolly Jokers and not the reverse wedgehead style. The cabinet art is the same as the later Trade Winds in the reverse wedgehead cabinets but with a different color scheme. Note that mine has been repainted, but to the original colors and design.

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Very nice, Tom. Is the blue on the playfield dark blue, or lighter as on most of them? I have a playfield that is dark blue, and I believe it came from an early production example.

It's a medium blue, seems to be considerably darker than the reverse wedgehead version. This one had a lot of planking and wear, so there are a lot of touchups but you can see the original ink.

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"Trade Winds" is a very good player. Good looker too, despite there's no babes on it. Just one sailing dude who is gauging something between his fingers. Strange.

Hot Line has them and it was 1966. Zig Zag 1964 also has chrome.

River Boat 1964 has red.

SHANGRI-LA ... The reason why there are models with metal or plastic-flippers can easily be answered - since this was a very succesful machine (4900 units, most of them went to Europe where 4-Players were demanded) with a very long production-run (ranging from serial-numbers around 74000 up to 85000) this was also the time when the plastic-flippers appeared again. All Shangri-La machines with plastic-flippers I ever saw had high serial-numbers above 80000. But the majority of them had metal-flippers and lower serial-numbers.

I think the WMS pins from 1960-69 era are some of the best that pinball had to offer, maybe even surpassing GTB.
Most 1961-65 WMS pins are especially great.
I have a small stash of spare red and chrome metal flippers.

I’m almost done bringing back a Big Deal. Just need to get the drop target decals re-made.

Alberto

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Metal flippers on Moulin Rouge (1965).

Good write up. Williams in the mid 60s was so great.

A thread about chrome flippers...and no pics of any chrome flippers. Hmmmmm....

Yeah. You don't see that game very often here in the US.

King Pin is on my wish list with 4 of them.
My Palooka has the red enamel/white lettered cast metal bats. Very nice example aquired from JTAmuse a few years ago. I suspect it had minimal play and was not abused. Had an old military base label on it when it reached me. I have a set of bats from a Wing Ding parted out that are polished cast alloy, or maybe chromed? You be the judge..

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The flyer for Apollo seems to indicate chrome flippers as well, as does one user picture on ipdb.

https://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=77&picno=68063

Thank you posting more pics of the flippers. I never knew these were a thing! Still learning and exploring the pinball world...thank you for starting this thread! Following

My Teacher's Pet will never leave. A Steve Kordek masterpiece.
Chrome flippers, marquis, great art, weird cab to accommodate the coin mech that took dimes, nickels and quarters in one chute.
So much fun. A real one more time game.

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My own Apollo has chrome bats yet a customers one I'm overhauling has red ones. Chrome looks nicer to me though.

I believe that game should have plastic flippers. Must have been retro-fitted at one time.
Our local arcade back in the '70s had two copies of Williams "Granada". One had chrome flippers. I believe that game was also originally fitted with plastic flippers and was likely converted at some point.

Yep, mine also has plastic (though I would prefer chrome). It's not clear to me either how they were shipped, the flyer looks like chrome, but a lot of the games I've seen are plastic.

Of course the flyer also shows two rubbers on the flipper...is that correct? If I ever try 2, it leads to airballs...

Hmm. Never saw one with metal ones.

I saw lots of pins back in the day, where operators install two sets of rubber rings on the flippers,
and in my area it was normally 2in white on the bottom with 1-3/4in red rings on top.
I really like that two tone ring flipper accent look and do that on a lot of my games from that era.
Never really notice any airball problems.
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Sorry for posting pics of some non metal flippers in this topic thread,
but wanted to show the contrast of the double red/white flipper rings look.
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Overall I really like games that had flippers that spell out FLIPPER on top of the flippers,
be it metal painted red or chrome or white plastic, especially the rounded top versions,
I am not as much a fan of GTB's later flat top 2in flipper with lettering and special round/flat rubbers that came with.
I also liked it when BLY on occasion changed up the color of the flipper bats to orange or blue.

I'm now a little curious about the Wing Ding and Big Strike. I'm thinking
Wing Ding has metal flippers, but not so sure about Big Strike.
The Vagabond, Trade Winds, and Friendship 7 have chrome, the Palooka has
red metal flippers. I have a couple others, but can't recall the flippers' color.
I plan on digging them out before long. Always interesting checking out the
machines that's been stored and not seen in quite some time..

I had Big Strike and Wing Ding. Both of mine had metal flippers. My Big Daddy is supposed to but doesn't.

Yup. Found pics of the Big Strike.

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This is a project for the anal detail person in me, not likely to be me,
but hopefully someone at some time will compile all the various types of 2in flippers there are and what games they were originally used one.
At least from 1960 thru end of 2in flipper era.
Most likely hard to do a definitive list, as many games had various parts exchanged by operators or owners over time.
The flyers often are not much help, especially when B&W and low res.

Also someone should compile a catalog of the all the posts on individual games, their colors and correct placement on the playfield,
as after many shop jobs I am sure many games had posts replaced somewhat willy nilly.

I think Sam Harvey started to compile such a post position/color list.

Absolutely. When operators parted out their older machines they kept the metal-flippers becuase they were hard to destroy. In the mid-seventies you could see lots of newer 2-inch-models from ALL manufacturers, especially FMBC, FIREBALL and NIP-IT fitted with metal-flippers.

Also I'm sure metal-flippers were not an ordering-option on machines like APOLLO. If there were some APOLLO's with metal-flippers they must have been Test-Samples.

And from 1962 on there were generally 2 rubber-rings fitted on each flipper. It's not only on the flyer, this was real. 2 rubber-rings look much better than one, also it protected the flipper from getting broken. It's neither original nor better looking when people fit their 2-inch-flippers with just 1 rubber. It also was the case that most operators fitted the pre-1962-machines with 2 rubbers to protect the flipper from getting broken. No idea where this "new" trend comes from to return to just one rubber.

My 1966 8-Ball (both machines) have the chrome flippers.Williams 8 Ball Play Field #1 (resized).jpg

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Couple pics of Merry Widow. Low plays.
I understand why, fastest SDTM ever created.
Still, pretty.

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Cool game! It's like Heat Wave and Moulin Rouge had a baby. Would love to play it sometime.

I had a Merry Widow a while back. It had red metal flippers.

Swing Time!!

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Here is my Full House .

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You would be disappointed. Lot of features, swinging targets, ball shooters and drop targets. Ball play time is 10 seconds.
You might get one good ball every ten. I was frustrated enough to close off side outlanes until I sold it.

The Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda CA has probably one of the most vast EM collections,
with tons of early 60s WMS EMs, Along with tons of Woodrails and GTB and BLY EMs)
That is in part due to the fact that 60s WMS pins were my favorite to acquire and collect and play.
At one time I had about 75 of the 170 WMS EMs from 1960-1978 eras
and I have since donated the vast majority of my collection to the PPM.
Including all the WMS reverse wedgehead pins ever produced.
And what games that I did not donate, of WMS EMs from 1960-78 eras,
they acquired the remaining (about 90% of WMS EM pins) thru other donors.

Another great place to play WMS EMs from the 60s & 70s is at Matt Cristiano's Pinball Ranch in San Benito county CA
where he has a bunch, most of those from the Sam Harvey acquired collection.

Apollo had plastic, but I've seen several that sported chrome... looks much, much better.

One of my 2 Bally Alligator's was converted to Metal-Flippers. Of course they were replaced by original orange ones from Bally then and I received good money for the Metal-Flippers.

Could be they began life as polished alloy and were painted/powder coated red as an option to suit another model perhaps. See picture of a Palooka I recently overhauled where its red bats show the alloy? underneath. Great playing machine too, I really enjoyed doing this one. And yes, I did adjust the bats to line up correctly
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The Casanova that I picked up today has them!

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