Michigan Pinball – Pinball blog for Detroit Pinball Club
One of the visitors has a dad who ownes a 1993 Dataeast Last Action Hero (LAH) pinball. The machine hadn’t been turned on in some time, so he asked me to come over and get it running for dad. The game overall was in decent enough condition, but it had not been turned on in about 10 years. The grandkids were asking, so the game needed to be fixed.
So we went on a small buying spree and got a couple 1990s Williams WPC style pinball games with that there fancy dot matrix thingy. The first game was a 1992 Williams Getaway (High Speed2), and that repair/restoration went pretty quickly. Other than some nasty battery corrosion, it wasn’t too hard to get that game playing and looking good. It was the 1993 Williams Indiana Jones that was more of a challenge, hence this blog entry. Both these games were “re-imports”, meaning they were made in Chicago then exported to some foreign land, and then brought back here in a big container. In the case of this Indy Jones it was pretty hammered too, it looked like it had a lot of miles. Our job was to make it fresh again.
One of the games we got in that load of 40 machines was a 1978 Bally Freedom solidstate pinball. Now this model came in both EM and SS formats. The EM format is much more common, but we were straddled with the solidstate format. This game was to be given away in a local pinball tournament, so had to get it working.
Seeing how we’re in “skee ball mode”, I guess we should document the repair of this 1967 Chicago Coin Criss Cross Ski Ball game. In the prior post we talked about the Keeney skee ball. Here’s one that came in that same 40 game warehouse buy, and a game we decided to keep for the museum. Why this one? For one it’s in far better condition than the 10 year older Keeney. Also it’s a foot longer (longer is alway better when it comes to bowling games.) Finally the criss-cross feature of this game makes it quite unique. We’ll talk about that aspect later, let’s get down to what we did to restore the machine.
It’s been a month since we’ve done a blog posting on game repair. I apologize for this, but it’s been one hell of a month. We bought nearly 40 games from a local operator, and it took a month to get them fixed. The cost in time was enormous. It makes you wonder if it was all worth it. Back to the blog, here’s one game we repaired and sold, a 1957 Keeney Bowlette skee ball game. When done it was a pretty cool thing, and in many respects, I regret having it gone. But the good news is we also got a CCM skee ball game, in much better condition, and kept that. (You can read about that repair in a coming posting.)
