Gottlieb first baseball pinball machine7/26/2023 ![]() Stern and Jersey Jack also offer limited edition versions of each game with a higher price tag too. Jersey Jack Pinball is reportedly selling their Wizard Of Oz pinball machine for around $7500. When these games are available, they may share the same name as their more expensive counterparts, but they also lack certain features, and are therefore less desirable when it comes to reselling the game. Costco sometimes sells an “economy-type” pinball machine for around $4000. New games today usually cost around $5000. Some restored games can cost in excess of $2000, and while that might seem like a lot of money it’s still far less than the price of a new pinball machine! The price I end up charging is a reflection of the amount of work that I had to put into the game to get it where it is today. I’ve sold quite a few pinball machines some have been fully restored, while others have been just rehabilitated. In the end, the game plays like new, but in order to get paid appropriately for my work, I have to collect at least $1100 for the game to cover my costs – as long as I only work for $10/hour. I had to rebuild the flippers, and install new coils, I had to strip down all eight of the scoring units and recondition them. Then the pop bumpers and slingshots needed reconditioning as well. I dropped close to $300 in parts into the game and spent close to 40 hours working to rebuild the game, scrub it clean, strip the playfield, touch-up the areas where the ball had worn through the finish on the playfield, and give it three coats of wax so the ball flys the way it’s supposed to. The game had a great playfield and all of the game specific parts were in good shape. It wasn’t working when I bought it, but that didn’t matter to me because I was rebuilding it anyway. That particular game, I had purchased for $400. She said she thought the game would have cost $200 or $300!!! She looked at me like I had just said a dirty word and handed me my card back. She asked me how much I wanted for the game, and I told her $1200. ![]() ![]() I told her the game I was bringing in was for sale. A woman saw me, stopped me, and asked me if I sold pinball machines I politely gave her my card. I was bringing a game into Lanes & Games in Cambridge for a tournament a few months ago. The unsuspecting buyer may think to themselves that it’s an old pinball machine, so what should you expect? Well, old games that work “100%” should be working the way they did back when the game was new, and anything less is not 100%… Some of them will say they “shopped” the machine and that it works “100%”. They’ll offer similar titles at very low prices. Then when you have restored the game, spent 30 to 40 hours cleaning, polishing, rewiring, repairing, rebuilding, etc., you price it to sell – as best you can – and compete with the likes of people on Craigslist. These costs drive up the price of a restored game. The right parts for this game are hard to come by – mostly, because they’re 60 years old! Fortunately, there are no dead mice (or remnants of live mice) in this old game, but the challenges of restoring it to its former glory abound! Some of the parts can be rebuilt, while others (if they can be located) can cost hundreds of times more than they’re actually worth, because of supply (i.e. I’m restoring a puck bowling game for a customer right now. Maybe I am, but there’s always that feeling of self satisfaction when I finish a game, and see it ready to entertain people for another generation or two. It’s not cheap, it’s not easy, and I’ve heard people tell me I *must* be insane to do what I do. Dozens of relays, hundreds of contacts, the list goes on… Pop bumpers, scoring mechanisms, slingshots, and drop targets all need work and attention to make sure they all work properly too. Those flippers might have been nice and snappy back in the day, but they had to be rebuilt with all new parts to work like new again today. That metal might have come shiny 30 years ago, but it had to be buffed and polished to become shiny again. That nicotine gets everywhere, including inside of the game, and it has to be cleaned out… I’m not trying to take a cheap shot at smokers but I am trying to illustrate what kind of work goes in to restoring an old game. The only reason it looks tan is because it’s covered in nicotine, a sign that the game spent a lot of time in cigarette smoke. Restoring an old arcade machine is not as cool and glamorous as the end result sometimes appears – it’s often hard work, with long hours which go overlooked by many potential buyers.ĭid you know that old pinball machines were *not* painted tan or brown? Most pinball machines made before the 1980s had a white base coat.
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