The Machine: Bride of Pinbot

This is the second pinball machine I bought.  And it's the first machine I bought through eBay.  I had never even heard of  this machine before, but it looked neat from his ad, and the seller was an in-state dealer, so I felt pretty safe.

My first machine (F14) was delivered by the dealer I bought it from, but I was outside the delivery area of this dealer, so my brother and I took my pickup over to pick it up.  It was all packaged and ready to go, in the back of the seller's pickup, but it was standing on end.

This was the first time I had ever in my life seen a pinball machine standing up on end.  I know it's no big deal, but I still remember how amazed I was that you could store a pinball in that position.  (I was still in the very naive stage.)

So I butted my truck up to his and we slid it over.  Then we had to lay it down for the trip back.  My word that thing was heavy!  How on earth could what amounts to a mostly empty plywood box be so heavy? (Ah, to be young and naive).

As it turns out, the guy I bought the machine from was a vendor that was retiring and moving up north.  He had a nice shed in the back of the house and he showed me all the other stuff he had.  I ended up buying a Concord 2 as well.

Once we got the machine back to my brother's place (I hadn't made room for it yet at mine), we set to putting the legs back on.  Putting the legs on was simple enough, just two bolts in each corner.  But wait, how are we going to hold the machine up so we can attach the legs?  Well, that was easy enough, we just slid it half way out, attached two of the legs, then slid it out diagonally so that the front was sitting on the two legs already installed, one corner was still on the tailgate, and then we attached the leg to the other corner.  Once we had three legs on, that meant I only had to hold up one corner while my brother put the bolts in.

Once we had the legs on, we carried it inside (aurgh, it's even heavier than I thought!), and plugged it in.  Everything worked except for the right eye.

We were in a two player game and one of us got it in the right eye.  The machine didn't know about it though, because it went through it's ball locating thing, which unfortunately includes rotating the head.

So we raised the playfield and found that the head was covered with a large metal shield on the underside.  I still don't know what the purpose of the shield is, other than to catch the pinballs that it drops when trying to locate the ball.

The switch was bad, so while waiting for a new one to come in from Happ Controls, my brother completely stripped everything off the playfield and gave it a thorough cleaning.  Neither of us have seen a machine as dirty as this one before or since.

Once the new switch arrived, the head was working fine.  We never ended up reinstalling the metal shield under the playfield.  We didn't see much point to it, and it worked fine without it.

About 6 months after I bought it, I sold it to my brother's boss.  About two days after that, it developed a problem.

If both eyes were completed, the machine would lose those two balls when it ejected them.  I noticed that when two balls were held up by the gate, that the gate would tilt slightly down, so that the balls weren't holding the switches in anymore.  Luckily, I couldn't find a replacement for that part from Happ (Happ was the only company I knew of that sold pinball parts at the time, and I didn't have a manual for the machine, so I couldn't search by part number, so maybe they do stock it, and I just couldn't find it.)  So since I couldn't replace it, I just took a paperclip and a pair of vice-grips, and bent a little triangle around the pin & the bracket on the underside of the playfield to hold the pin in place.  It's held up for about a year and a half now.

I'm not sure how or why it happened, but about 3 months ago, my brother's boss (and now my boss too) broke one of the flippers on the machine.  Snapped the bat right off the pin.  My brother replaced both bats with Happ replacements just so they'd match.