Are Williams Amusements a better bet than Home Leisure?
https://www.williamsamusements.co.uk/
Just asking - Personally I haven't bought from either.
I got my Fish Tales from Williams Amusements.
I paid £3,200 for it in July and it’s missing a fish topper, which wasn’t ridiculous given HLD prices, but wasn’t - at the time - realistic for a Fish Tales in that condition. I say ‘at the time‘ because pin prices still seem to be rising.
It arrived filthy with a ball jam that the Williams Amusements guy didn’t know how to fix. After asking on Pinside and a bit of investigation, it turned out that the slingshots had 3” rubbers and this was trapping the ball in the left inlane. Even the most basic check of the pin could have resolved that problem and it was obvious it had not been played before being sold (or someone else would have noticed the problem).
I’ve subsequently, while re-rubbering the FT, have found numerous other wrong-sized rubbers. There are also numerous ‘bodge jobs’ on the machine, such as a piece of wire holding the Caster’s Club popper in place, all of which were causing intermittent faults. We’re still finding and fixing the intermittent faults.
I admit that some of the intermittent faults were very intermittent and could have escaped casual detection. Unfortunately, after we’d played Fish Tales five to ten times a day for four months, the Caster’s Club fault stopped being occasional and became game breaking (we’ve now bought a 20p metal dowel and fixed the fault).
The underside of the playfield has powdery mildew in literally every single insert. Again, a decent check of the pin would have involved - at the very least - cleaning off the mildew.
So, I paid over the odds for a guy to buy a FT on eBay for £2,600 (which I believe is the price he said he got it for), stick it in a warehouse, and resell it again with f**k all done to it. Nice £800 profit for him with the only work required having the storage space for the FT while it was sold.
On the upside, if you want a crash course in pinball restoration and repair self-taught via YouTube videos and internet forum questions, it’s a great way to get into the hobby. And I’m not even entirely joking…
Also, the Fish Tales was in stock and arrived promptly within a couple of days.