Data East Secret Service

Found a pin on Craigslist here in Surrey BC.  It was a Data East Secret Service.

The playfield looks pretty good and it is from the same era as the Playboy - I can swap boards and some other parts.  Which is good because it doesn't run.

I had a good rapport with the seller but I always cringe when they tell me "it doesn't work but I think the problem is....".  Why didn't you fix it then?  I always lowball at that point. 

And it turns out the seller of this game was wrong.  He thought transformer.  The power board isn't working.  I swapped in the Playboy board and the game fired up immediately.  I'm going to try my hand at trouble shooting and repairing the board.

But the game looks cool and I think it will play nice.

Here it is in all its glory.

More pins from the USA.

I really enjoyed fixing the Amazing Spider Man pinball machine I picked up. It was a nice chance to get to tinker on a project. The layout is really old looking and captures the comic styles of Ditko pretty well.  I think I will be keeping it for a while and slowly returning it to restored condition.

I caught the bug for pinballs though. And started looking to expand my collection. Shortly before the long weekend I found 2 machines for sale in the US. I called and set up times to go look at them.

I left Friday morning right after shift at 2am and drove to Portland. The first machine was a Data East 35th Anniversary Playboy. It was made in 1989.

The machine was in good shape but not running so I picked it up on the cheap. The board had fried but the previous owner had bought and installed a new board. I figured I could get it running. It took soldering in a new power supply pin and some work on the switches in the playfield.  But it works, and is hella - fun to play.

The second machine was a Williams F14 Tomcat. Super fast game - #94 on the top 100 pinballs made listings. The guy selling it owned a company that supplied pins to bars. He seemed like a good guy and I paid an ok price for the game, figuring I could sell it later if I didn't like it. It was missing the red white and blue lights on the top but had LEDs in the play field. Super bright. It plays 100%

P.I.N.B.A.L.L.

The safety work I am doing in Vancouver is on the Expo Line for Skytrain.  While we were working one of the Skytrain employees mentioned to me that he had a pinball machine he wanted to sell.

Upon review it turned out to be a Gottlieb Series 80 Spider-Man.

I bought it - Duh....

Moved it into the townhouse with the help from my friends.  It is heavy.
I bought the machine being told it was working.  But I never actually plugged it in at time of purchase.  Ooops.

Because it wasn't working.  And for arguments sake lets just say maybe it got jostled a bit in the move and that's the reason.... Whatever.

So I bought a digital multi-meter and sourced the issue - turned out to be the power board.  I took the board in to John's Jukes here in Vancouver for repair.  But once the board was back in the machine other problems surfaced.  So I bought a board from Flippp.fr
Once that arrived and was installed the game fired up and worked electronically. 

I repaired the pop bumpers with boards from RottenDog.com.  And repaired a kicker bracket.

And, finally, it plays correctly.

It is a lot of fun.  Quite a bit older and thus slower than new games it none the less has a certain charm.  I'm unlikely to sell it quickly so I don't mind the parts and work that has gone into it. 

I also found I enjoyed the process of repairing it.  I may look for a few more pinballs in the future.

Yay! A new hobby.......