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diy high end pin?

wayne g

Registered
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
426
Location
not far from Cardiff
with the current lunacy of ten grand pins on ebay is it not a better option to buy a wreck and restore it?

surely to god you could buy a MM/AFM/ETC ETC somewhere (even if it is a basket case/barn wreck) and then spend money to get it new and shiny?



i dont have the skill or experience to do it myself but it must be a do'er to that that can?



are these ebay 'collectors quality' pins surely not cheaper to build from bits?
 
I wondered that with my TAF. A new play field (if you can find one) was about £700, new cab about £700, all new plastics and toys £500. You are really only keeping the electronics. Buy a knackered one for £1k and it would be a mint machine for under £3k. Obviously you could save money and do the cab yourself, not all the plastics will be junk but it would be a lot of effort and these days even junk version of the machines are selling.

Might be worth it for MM though...
 
You'd probably only need the boards and wiring loom to be in decent shape out of your doner pin and as you say, maybe use the cab and do a full tear down and re-decal. If you've got the tools, time and skills then the only problem I could see is getting hold of a doner machine. You don't see many knackered MM's or AFM's turn up for sale but maybe one of the operator guys on the group could hook you up with something.



Can you get most of the pf toys and mechs new for the A list titles these days?
 
Did it with my MB, it was a lot of work and still cost a lot of dollar, saying that I was £2700+ in before I started so it was not going to be cheap, it's all down to how much time you have, not much in my life so I gave up all my evenings for weeks doing the pf swap etc etc, if it's anything like restoring motorcycles and it probably is, in the long run it's cheaper to just pay for a restored example as when you add up the man hours and parts it is not cost effective unless you are working for peanuts + you remove the risk of any f**k ups like naff installed decals or some gremlin that appears during the pf swap.......... when you start moving a complete loom around things can come apart, had a few things to tweak when I put mine back together, eddy boards were not playing ball etc, got it all sorted but you are opening yourself up to a potential headache.
 
hhhmmmm. good input andy.

like i said though, if it's your dream pin and you have the time im sure you could save a few quid.

there's also the sense of achievement if you were to do it that might make the game that more satisfying?



i know what you mean about bikes though...cheaper to buy restored than to restore.
 
Totally know where you are coming from on this post, maybe I see things different as I am not a hobbyist anymore
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, from my experience with shopping to doing a refurb on pins and bikes, the mindset is always the same, until you have had it in bits, played with parts and rebuilt, you never quite own
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I understand, that connection from knowing the machine because you have been in there and worked on it.

It is ironic that for years my work has put a value on my time as a day rate yet I can spend the time fitting an exhaust to a car and consider I have saved myself £80
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But spending time on these things is one of my hobbies and I could be interested in something like Golf that costs a lot to be a member of a club and so on.

If people enjoy restoring pins, have the space then I think a DIY project would be a good idea. Just don't count the hours and the cost of smaller parts, it will only take away from the pleasure and achievement.
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Calimori' date=' post: 1695246 said:
I wondered that with my TAF. A new play field (if you can find one) was about £700, new cab about £700, all new plastics and toys £500. You are really only keeping the electronics. Buy a knackered one for £1k and it would be a mint machine for under £3k. Obviously you could save money and do the cab yourself, not all the plastics will be junk but it would be a lot of effort and these days even junk version of the machines are selling.

Might be worth it for MM though...



Whilst your figures look good on paper, if you want to make a "mint" example the new parts list goes something like this:



Decals, Playfield, DMD, Glass, Side rails

Legs, bolts, levellers, Coin door, Playfield glass channel

Plastics, pinbits plastic protectors (where available)

Pop bumper assembly (caps, bodies, bases, skirts, rod/ring, yokes)

Star posts, lane guides, rubbers

Scoop (where available)

Plastic ramps

Targets

Re-plating of metal parts

Flipper rebuild kit

New coils (Optional)



Very quickly, your parts list will add up to £2k. Clearly you have old parts to sell (if ok) but then on top of that you have all the hours to put in which runs something like:



Cabinet work + decals + strip and rebuild - 25

Strip old playfield - 3

Clean all game specific parts to be re-used - 15+

T Nut new playfield - 1

Refinish metal lane guides - 2

Put metal posts into new playfield (drilling new playfield is a necessity) - 2

Rebuild underside of playfield - 8

Take off loom, clean and put on new playfield - 10

Rebuild top side of playfield - 12

Clean and service boards - 5

Connect up boards - 1



Those figures are probably on the low side, I don't do my own cabinets anymore as it takes too long, I normally spend somewhere around 70 hours on a restore but they do turn out nice so it is worth it. Here's one in progress:



http://s94.photobucket.com/albums/l107/mufcmufc/TZ/
 
That is great going on the time frame, can't remember how long my pf swap took but it was long and tedious, deffo longer than what you can achieve it in, probably depends on the machine also, MB and TAF's are the worst apparently, I have a TAF to do at some point but in no rush. It is all the small bits that start mounting up in cost, nothing is cheap in pinball as we all know, I cleaned all the metal fastners and did all the metal guides etc along with the pops, flippers and welded some of the broken parts, it is satisfying to do one but it is more satisfying having someone else do one for you
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Judge Dreads' date=' post: 1695273 said:
The opening line is the clincher "I'm retired"
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Louis Armstrong - We Have All The Time In The World



Edit.. He has all the time in the world.
 
Someone wise once said that we all have 60 minutes in each hour, doesn't matter if you are the president of the US or someone sleeping in a cardboard box, that is all you have to play with.
 
Time is relative to the observer.

If I am enjoying something it doesn't matter how long it takes. Playfield swaps do sound tedious and I had missed a lot of parts that would be required to make a machine mint. Mine is far from mint and I spot a new defect on my machine daily and probably will do until I learn to live with it. Better to just get on and enjoy playing it.



But that chaps description of his MM is very interesting. He didn't do it because he had to, he did it because he wanted to. This was not to own a machine he couldn't afford or to sell it to make a profit. We could throw many gentle insults his way such as he has too much time on his hands or he should just play the MM he had but he took a challenge and set to seeing how it would turn out. His son also posts that his Dad has always just fixed things.

His completed MM is a replica but is a good honest one and honesty is worth as much as integrity to me. Considering the world of high price restorations, where a restored machine (car/motorbike/Trigger's Broom) may have very little originality to what left the factory.

I know people who ended up building their dream cars from spares...
 
Even if i had the time, which i don't, i wouldn't have the skill or the patience. I just know it would all go very wrong. I stripped the ramp and a few other bits of my Taf to give it a better clean, when i put it back together it all worked and i was SO relieved but it nearly went all wrong. The ramp connector has a blank pin, one of the pins had come out of the connector, i looked a dozen times had it spot on in my head and put it back in the blank hole!!, could i get it out after that? not on your life. I used hammers crowbars and chainsaws but that pin would not come out. It took me longer to do that pin than the whole strip down, clean and re assembly. I didn't want to take it all apart again to get the pin out, i couldn't move the machine on my own so i was half climbed in the cab, castrating myself on the corner of the cab, cursing and swearing and had to strip it back down anyway.

I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day!

Never again.

Adie
 
When I have to move my machine, I get underneath and lift it on my back like a tortoise. I once found out that my missus was watching and didn't know whether to laugh at how stupid it looked or cry that I really lost the plot.

Hammers, crowbars and chainsaws on a connector might have been overkill, no wonder your cab tried to castrate you.

You fixed it in the end so well done.
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Always handy to have a big hammer handy when fixing pins and if that don't work............... find an even bigger hammer
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