Introduction:

Legend has it that once upon a time there was a behemoth distributor and importer of video games and pinball machines called State Sales and Coin. This was one of the largest distributors and re-importers of pinball machines in all the land. An over-eager pinball enthusiast and collector ventured with his brother to this vast wasteland of forgotten pinball equipment. Lo, our heroes did not know the adventure that would await them...

Upon entering the warehouse, there were games as far as the eye could see. Stacked on specially made racks, 7 to 10 pinball machines high. The warehouse had forklifts scooting to-and-fro. According to the sales person at the building, there were 850 pinball machines in this particular warehouse. Judging by the breadth of the warehouse shelving system, they were not lying. From this empire of pinball machine glory, sprung forth our subject for this project. A rusty, burnt-up, non-working, filthy, dirty, very heavily used piece of rotting garbage. The game was called Mystery Castle. It had easily been years since it had seen any play. The game was complete, but most definitely not working. Any other pinball-repair team would have scoffed at it, telling the salesperson that he was insane, and would have continued looking around the warehouse for a more likely candidate. Not us. Not this time. We bought it. For better or worse, this was Torrey's graduation project. There was no guarantee that the game would ever be workable, in which case, we would sacrifice the work and pick another game. Luckily, we were very successful with our restoration process. The following is a chronological representation of the work that ensued to make this ex-pinball rise again amongst the living and playable.

These machines are designed for the purpose of having the public play them. They are top-grade commercial equipment. Like any other mechanical equipment, they require a certain amount of maintenance. Due to economics, time constraints, and all-around laziness, the people who own the machines that are out for the public to play (commonly called route operators, or 'operators' for short) typically do not maintain them properly. Proper maintenance would consist of test plays from time-to-time, rubber-ring replacement where needed, lightbulb replacements where needed, cleaning and waxing of the playfield, and cleaning of the glass. If operators would take the few minutes needed to perform these proper and basic maintenance procedures, the games would never get to the state that Mystery Castle was in when we acquired it.


The Work Begins:

We brought the machine home to begin the laborious task of refurbishing this machine. One of the more important parts of the whole process is reviewing the current condition of the game. This will allow you to get a feel for what will need to be done during the refurbishing process (commonly called 'shopping the machine' or 'shopping' for short). On Mystery Castle, Torrey had his work cut out for him, as this machine needed EVERYTHING.


First Steps:

Obviously, no work could be done on the machine unless we could plug it in to the American electrical plugs. Conversion consisted of removal of the strange Italian electrical plug, and replacement with a standard, grounded American plug. Also, Italy is set up for 220 Volts AC, 50 Hertz. As it was configured, even with the correct plug, the game would NEVER work in America. Thankfully, the game manufacturers had planned ahead for this, and the internal main transformer for the game has a plug that can be replaced to jumper it for America's standards. Unfortunately, we didn't have this plug. We were able to acquire the wire mappings, and we set off to replicate the factory plug.

Success! The game is up and running, and we were able to take the first steps in testing to see what had lay ahead of us.

Click here for a gallery of pictures from the initial phases of checking this machine over.