Recently, my uncle Bill was killed in a freak accident while driving down to the Miami Boat Show. Bill was the most interesting man that many people get to meet, with an interest in details bordering on the obsessive. In his eulogy, I spoke about that interest in details and how it applied to everything and everybody in his life. He saw a genuine beauty in those details.
Nowhere is an eye for details more critical than in the replacement of a playfield in a pinball machine. Literally thousands of components need to be transplanted from the old playfield to the new playfield. It is, at best, a painstaking process and perhaps not the best fit for my more typical approach of "fix the damned thing now!"
After years of waiting, I received an email informing me that the reproduction playfields were finally ready for my Flight 2000 pinball machine. It was the first pinball that I bought and is the only pinball machine in the house today. I love the game play and love that the kids will play it if it is powered up and they walk by. I bought the machine for a decent price (C$475?), even considering the condition (playfield worn to the bare wood, broken targets, random resets, etc.). I spent the next two weeks opening her up, polishing every nook and cranny and retouching the smallest imperfection as best I could with my limited skills. Unlike most in this hobby, I like to keep my machines, not roll them over (mostly because I am a shitty salesman).
So, when I read, back in the November 2005 issue of GameRoom Magazine, that there was this new company producing new pinball playfields and that one of the titles that they wanted to do was my beloved Flight 2000, I knew that my ownership of this game had just become an personal odyssey. F2K is a B-Title at best and in good shape rarely commands about $600.
A new playfield, should they actually make them, was going to run about $600. Add to that a new set of plastics at $180 and, hopefully a new backglass (mine is horrible) and we end up well over a thousand bones, not to mention dozens of hours of time and effort, to restore a machine that I can never make my money back on.
As a number of people noted, this is exactly the type of financial transaction that Bill would think was a good idea!
So, I have bit the bullet and completed my preorder for a brand new playfield and new set of plastics with an eye to doing a complete transplant in the spring.
It is going to be meticulous, frustrating and painstaking, but I am going to try to see all of those nit-picky little details through Bill's eyes and celebrate the beauty of the restoration.
Or I'll take his target rifle and shoot it full of holes.
Who can really be certain ?
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