We have been thinking on how to continue to mod out the Data Easts pinball machine Guns N Roses and putting Marhsall amps next to Slash was a given. We are also experimenting with powdercoating the metal trim on the outside of the game. (side rails, lockdown bar, legs and hinges). More to come on that.
Great American Pinball will be designing a line of Super Cool Pinball t-shirts and will follow up with a Calendar. Some time in the near future, Every customer who buys a Pinball machine from GAP will receive a free T-shirt of his/her choice and a calendar of all the artwork on the t-shirts. T-shirts will be available to purchase online. Below is the some 0f the concept art. GAP already has 12 designs. Would like to print up some T’s for Expo, which one should we print first.
Great American Pinball And Back Alley Creations has teamed up to offer custom Pirtes of the Caribbean pinball machines at Pinball Expo in Oct. We will offer custom powdered Pinball machines as well as trim kits it you want to mod them out yourself. Matt has done it again, creating kick ass custom accents for the end of the left ramp, your right and left in lane plastics, shooter lane and more. If you can’t wait to purchase one of these machines at Expo, you can order one now. Check out my New and used Stern Pinball machines today.
Yep your reading it right here. Great American Pinball is offering Custom Hot Rod Red Iron Man Pinball machines. Get in on this before Stern shuts down the run for AVATAR. Machines are being offered with new custom powdered coated Hot Rod Red Trim kit, flipper fidelity sub woofer, shaker motor, and LED’s throughout the whole game.
Great American Pinball And Back Alley Creations has teamed up to offer custom Spiderman pinball machines at Pinball Expo in Oct. We will offer custom powderd Pinball machines as well as trim kits it you want to mod them out yourself. Matt has done it again, by retooling his molds to make his custom spiderman buildings thinner, adding in glass windows and doing a hell of a custom paint job to each building. Matt’s subway train is awesome and really adds detail to the right side of the machine. If you can’t wait to purchase one of these machine at Expo you can order one now. Check out my New Stern Pinball machines today.
In 2003 I purchased around 8 Zaccaria pinball machines from Kurt Weaver who imported 100+ Zaccaria’s from overseas in 2003. My goal was to shop all eight and have David Gersic rebuild all the boards and get the games working by the 2004 Expo. You can see a picture of David in front of all my games in my basement. It took us a year to get all the games up and running. We brought them to the 2004 pinball Expo for everyone to enjoy. It was the single largest gathering of fully working Zaccaria pins in North America. The line up at the 2004 pinball Expo was Robot, Farfalla, Time Machine, Devil Riders, Clown, Soccer Kings, Pinball Champ, Magic Castle.
Well been looking to pimp a Cirqus Voltaire pinball machine out for the longest time . I am getting into powder coating and what better machine to pimp out then an over the top Pinball like Cirqus Voltaire. I found a co that had the same color purple as the power coating of the Apron. We powder coated the legs, side rails, shinges, coin door and metal ball rails inside the game. Finished painting the inside of the cabinet and back box head. The pinball machine was stripped of all its parts. Playfield was polished 4 times with polishing compounds. We populated the playfield with LED’s from Cointaker and put LED’s under the Playfield from Pinball Life. The following new parts were added, rubers, rubber post sleeves, purple starposts, flipper bats, pop bumper bodies. Replaced broken platics with new plastics, scrolls, bell for back box, target foam backing and decals. Installed new head decals and a LED shooter Rod from Pinball Decals.
Found a little motivation to continue on with my custom pinball machine. Hoping to do a little each month and have it done by the Pinball Expo. The theme of the game is of my favorite band The Who. This will be a one a kind machine. I plan to clear coat the cabinet after the art work is done apply new side rails , legs shooter rod , legs bolts, levelers and new pinball glass. The backglass will be a translite and the playfield is goining to be hand drawn/traced and airbrushed. I may sink the playfield farther down into the cabinet and add a ramp to the game. Also looking to add the music from the who as the game stars up in plays Pinball Wizard, Sister Disco and Who are you.
Started adding some more graphics to the cabinet. Added Bands Logo. Going to add a black siloutte of Pete townsend either smashing his guitar or doing the windmill on one side of the head. Going to then add a Blck silouette of Roger holding the mic above his head or twirling it. I purchased new side rails, and front coin door. I chose the image for the translite I am going to have made.
I have had the privilege of knowing Earl Moloney for a majority of my life. Earl is my parents next door neighbor and living next door to Earl has allowed me the ability to walk over and talk pinball. Earl is the Nephew of the Late Ray Moloney the founder of Bally and Earl once owned Bally through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. Well get into that later. I went over to Earls yesterday to show him a picture of a Very Rare 1956 1/2 Prototype Ford Thunderbird that I came across while picking up a Rocky and Bullwinkle Pinball Machine. Earl Moloney is a car enthusiast and started up Maloney Coachworks, which has designed prototype cars for Cadillac and built bullet proof limousines for the Presidents of the United States.
As we talked about the car , we quickly switched gears and ended up talking pinball, go figure. He showed me around his home casino that housed 12 slot machines, a roulette table, a craps table , full bar and multiple Bally gambling devices. Earl can throw an incredible party with all the big wigs of Chicago, but that is another story that I plan to cover at his next party this summer . As we were talking , the phone rang and it was an executive from Bally/Williams. Earl still does business with Bally and is interesting onthat he still is conencted to the company. I will tell you now, it was not about pinball and there is no plans to make pinball machines in the future. The pictures to the right are of the first Bally Hoo gambling device, a picture of Ray Moloney, Earl Moloney Sr, Ray Jr Moloney and last a picture of the Bally Casino.
Earl is very passionate about the past Bally business and is going to allow me to go over the Bally Archive books and spend time with him gathering information about the history of Bally to blog on my website, so keep checking back . The gambling device your see to the right is a cigarette gambling device. This machine would be in a bar and the customer would put a nickel in the coin mechanism , he would then push in the coin slot and the machine lights would cycle over the packs of cigarettes. If the machine lighted two camel cigarette packs on the machine, the bartender would give them a pack of camel smokes. Nice! Customers that received three of a kind would get two packs of smokes and four of a kind will you get the picture. Earl told me he did not know this machine existed until a guy at one of his parties told him his Dad had one of these in his home. This is the guys machine which he sold to Earl a cople of years ago.
Another early Bally bar top gambling device was called Bally Baby. In the background you can see a 75th anniversary award awarded to Earl Moloney So you can see Bally was not just a Pinball Company but first started out as a manufacturer of gambling devices that where geared toward the bar owners. The Bally Baby was an early slot. I do not have the details on this machine but will update this blog as I find out more information.
Earl wall’s are decorated with tons of pictures and memorabilia from the Bally days and famous celebrities that are also his friends. Here is a pictured of the old bally plant where they use to manufacture pinball machines.
Back in the day Bally had a softball team, here is a picture of the softball team with Ray Moloney
Before I get to cleaning the playfield parts, I like to populate the freshly polished playfield with LED’s from Pinball Life. Terry is insane and so are his LED prices. I really like using Terry’s Ablaze 3-LED’s (44 & 555’s) under the playfield inserts, and I use his Ablaze 1 Frosted LED for the top side of the game. You have to experiment with the colors and it depends if you plan to play in the dark or in the light. I like to play Pinball in the light so I make my GI darker and use a lot of color. I do have games that I like to play in the dark and then I put all white LED’s in the GI’s. To the right is a Spiderman which I would only play with the lights on. I turned the lights off so you could get a feel of how the led’s really make the game pop. The picture makes it look darker than it really is and when you play the game you have more than adequate light to see the ball.
Cleaning playfield parts is a pretty labor intensive job. Anyone can clean plastics with windex and put the plastics and ramps back on, but I find that they still look dirty and dingy. Great American Pinball takes it a step further. The products I use to get crystal clean results on ramps and plastics are Super Clean, Novus 2, and a blow torch. The first thing we do is take off the ramp plastic covers to make sure we get to all the ramp parts. We then fill up the the work sink with a cup of Super Clean concentrated solution to a sink full of hot water. Make sure you wear rubber gloves, because Super Clean burns the skin. I then dip the parts in the sink for 2 seconds, pull it out, rinse it off and towel dry them. No need to scrub the ramps or plastics. A heavly soiled plastic from the top and bottom will look shiney when dipped in the Super Clean Solution. The dirt just melts off the plastic. Caution, do not leave plastics and metal parts in this solution for more than 10 minutes.
Flaming ramps is delicate procedure and should only be done if you are experienced with using a blow torch on plastic. If the torch is held to the plastic to long guess what, it warps and burns. If you plan to flame polish ramps, I recommend practicing on an old ramp or plastic you do not need. You first want to clean the ramps with Super Clean. From there you will use Novus 2 to take out the embedded dirt and grim. At this point you you can begin to flame the ramps. Each ramp usually gets flammed 3 to 4 seperate times. If you try to take out all the scratches, ball trail marks and micro scratches at once, you will over stress the plastic and it will either bubble, warp or spiderweb. On the first pass lightly glaze over the ramp in a fairly fast motion so that the flame is not in one point for more than a second. If you hold the plastic at a certain angle to your eye, it is easier to see the scratches you are trying to remove with the tourch. Let the ramp cool down and repeat. You will notice that the smaller micro scratches disappear. Once your are done with the 2nd pass, let the plastic cool down and then concentrate on taking out the larger scratches by passing the torch over the ramp slower, but not so slow enough that the torch is in one place for more than two seconds.
Once the plastics and Ramps are all cleaned your can then reassemble the game usig the pictures you took when you tore it down. Below are Pictures videos of the game assembled, with the lights on and then with the lights off. Enjoy!
