Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Little Pro manikin game works

The Southland Little Pro manikin golf game is restored :)

Just noticed I hadn't posted anything about it here the last weeks.
This was my christmas holiday project - it took me a few days to disassemble and clean everything. It wasn't too bad to get working (it's very simple technically).
Most things were working, it was more a matter of cleaning switches and adjusting, ..
It's a fun game, pretty easy once you get used to it, but still fun.

The TOP dvd about manikin games was a help. The resistor/varistor (whatever it's called) was also bad on mine, and another resistor too. Once these were replaced the golfer has enough power in his swing again to get the little metal balls to the end of the playfield.

Haven't had time to write something about it on the website, will do this once the gameroom is reorganised (now everything is too close together to make decent pictures).

some changes

It's been a while since I posted. As always I was busy with a lot of things..

We made some important decisions and changes.. as we put too much time in pinball and everything related we're stopping with some of these things.

Don't worry though - our pinball website will remain.
New articles will still be posted, especially in the newbie / technical / modification sections. (feel free to email me if you want to submit an article, ie if you made an interesting mod to one of your pinball machines).

Articles about new shows may be less updated.. Even from shows in 2007 I haven't put a lot of pictures online as some shows always have the same exhibitors as the past year. Not a lot of use me posting pictures of exhibitors at a show that were there too the year before and the year before and the year before.. you really should know what to expect now at a show..

What is stopped however is technical support by email. In the past I often got emails from people with a problem, and we tried to help them by email. We don't have time for this anymore. Only email me if you do have some pinball repair skills and need help troubleshooting something. But don't expect me to learn you how to use a dmm, how to solder and how to fix your pin by email..

I also had on my website that people in Belgium could email me to get contact information of someone in their neighbourhood that could maybe help them with a repair. Again no more time to answer all these emails - I put some links to official repair people in Belgium on my site that you can contact direct. Only if you're in my area (Antwerp) I may be able to help you.

Finally we won't have any 'open days' at our house anymore.
Our gameroom and collection is now private.. the past years there have been an immense growth of pinball collectors in Belgium. That's a good thing of course, but the disadvantage is that everyone wanted to come. If we announced that people could come for an afternoon of pinball, a few hours later we had already reached out maximum amount of people.. so 2/3rd of the people that asked we had to turn down, which sometimes also made us feel bad as there were good friends that couldn't come..
we just know too many people ? :( So as to not disappoint anyone anymore or have people think that we prefer person X over person Y, it's easier for us not to invite anyone over anymore, instead of worrying if someone is going to be mad at us because he wasn't welcome..

We're also selling part of our pinball collection. Maybe I will regret this, maybe I won't.. we'll see. We have for instance a beautiful Twilight Zone (it almost looks as new, is in our personal collection for +7 years now) but my wife or I haven't played it in years. We both have our favorite games, and some other games are just standing there, only to be played by guests. The gameroom is full, games are crammed against each other (I know it's only 2 months since we rearranged everything), so we decided to only keep those games that we really love and play often, and rearrange the interior. Some people don't understand this (most collectors want as many games as possible and always try to fit an extra game in their house) but that's their problem. We always bought games because we wanted them, for ourselves. Not because a game was a 'must have in a collection'.

Our promo plastics collection is for sale on ebay.be right now, and many spare parts I have collected in the past years will follow. If you need anything, feel free to email me, as I have a lot of spare parts, NOS and from parted games.

I'm also parting out a Funhouse. If you need pcbs (displays, sound board, ..) or playfield parts (plastics, assemblies) then let me know..