so I bought a pinball machine: small machines moving in and out...

When the pandemic came to North America I already had a pile of things waiting for me at the mail pickup place in Ogdensburg NY. Lots of us in Ottawa would send packages to places like MyUSAddress and pop over the border to grab things.

There was a brief window when the Canada / US border was open and didn't require an expensive PCR test, and I took the opportunity to run down and grab 2.5 years worth of packages.

it was a lot

I say "brief window" because with the Omicron variant on the rise I presume that any day now the borders will once again have limitations. Thankfully I was able to get my entire haul.

There were 4 big items in the batch:

There was also a large amount of arcade-related books and art books, plus a few other small things.

arcade and adjacent

art books

But on to the machines. I was excited about all of these when I bought them, but the pandemic and the years between then and now dissipated much of that. I knew when I went down I probably wouldn't be keeping most of them.

This first one is a keeper though: A nicely restored 1968 single-shot pachinko with a recycler design. What that means is that balls that leave the playfield go right back into the ball storage hopper. Typically pachinko machines keep a hopper of spare balls at the top with spent balls falling in to a bottom tray, but by redoing the payout mechanism to be lower the balls are recycled back into play. These are GREAT for home environments since you don't have to reload them. Note the jackpot balls visible in the lower left window, where most games of this era would have the balls visible in the center feature.

"Single shot" means you place each ball in the slot to shoot it. I actually kind of prefer this slower and relaxed play style. By the end of the 1960s two major changes happened to pachinko: Loading trays allowing for repeated shots became legal again, and a rubber stopper gets added to the upper right of the track so the balls would no longer spin around the whole playfield.

The restoration is not perfect. There are 2 nails they forgot to put back into the playfield (look to the lower right pocket) but it's still wonderful. The small design elements are beautiful. There are 2 cracked plastics, but I can keep an eye out to replace those eventually. Maybe I'll find a 3d-print file for them some day.

1968 single-shot recycler pachinko

This Novomat project was fine, but I had no room and no time. I sold it right away. It worked sluggishly, was missing a coin tube and needed a full tear-down and cleaning.

Novomat - Germany slot machine by Wulff circa 1953

Next was this Whir-Pool Jr that I really don't have the space for. Well, I actually DO have space for it currently (see below) but it's not part of my long-term plans. If I do eventually buy a square pinball game to keep it has to be the Maple Leaf just because it's from Canada.

Whir-Pool Jr circa 1932

High Score is actually a fairly cool game! But I have so many trade stimulators and only so much room, so I made the decision to sell it. I was going to wait a year before getting rid of it, but an opportunity came up.

High Score trade stimulator

Here are what things currently look like in a corner of the back room:

oh the density! Some thing are just temporarily displaced, I swear...

The opportunity arose to make a deal for 2 other machines and I took it. High Score got traded, and the money from Novomat plus a bit extra helped me secure these two:

I've wanted a Kicker Catcher for a while. They're really fun machines! They were made first in the 1930s with productions happening up until the 1990s. See my post Niche Mechanisms 002: catchers for more examples of them. I always assumed I'd find one locally or at a future coinop show, and I was right. One came up nearby. This version is from the 1950s and is very economically designed, stripped of most excess material. It's not fancy, but it plays very well.