Old Pinball Machines Are Amazingly Complex [video]

One of my dreams, if I am ever able to retire while still able bodied and have some extra cash, is to buy a broke ass fully mechanical pinball machine and fully restore it. Tear it down to its frame and go over everything and restore it to perfect condition. The kind of restoration where I will inevitably sink far more money into the machine than it will ever be worth. Maybe a mechanical pachinko machine too.

I am sure it will be so frustrating and I will love the shit out of it. I wish this was still a viable career option. I do electronics repair work as a side business because I really enjoy it. the vast majority of what I end up doing is fixing broken consoles and the occasional piece of industrial equipment from a local business that doesn’t want to spend $$$ on an entire new pcb or whatever. That’s fun in its own right but there’s something about a big mechanical thing with solenoids and whatnot that’s just so much cooler. I occasionally will get a 3d printer or cnc and that’s somewhat close I guess. One time I did buy a vintage cash register from 1923 and redid that. It was a total pain but so much fun and actually turned out to be worth quite a bit once cleaned up and working well. Not nearly enough to justify the amount of time it took of course

Sometimes I see YouTube videos of people that restore stuff like this for work and I have to wonder how they sustain that in this day and age. Do they live near pinball fanatics? Are they just “the person” for pinball restoration? I’ll keep working my day job and continue to occasionally do it for fun I suppose

I am amazed at how simple, yet complex the internals of that machine are. I especially find it neat that there's seemingly only one motor, and all of the other parts are driven by solenoids.

Just surprised Alec took that one apart and didn’t have a separate one already disassembled.

I’m only about halfway through, but like most of his videos this one is fascinating