
Though it’s commonly associated with dinging bells and chimes in the 1960s, and electronic whirring and beeps in the 1980s, the pinball machine has entered a new era of popularity.
These physical, electromechanical games entered a rough patch during the influx of video games in the 1990s. But in 2023, The Economist reported that sales of new machines by pinball’s biggest manufacturer, Stern, have risen by 15–20% every year since 2008. Pinball tournaments and community events are booming too, with thousands being held each year.
Part of this resurgence in the pinball business can strangely be credited to the Covid-19 pandemic. While it hurt arcades, barcades, and the social aspects of pinball, it increased demand for home buyers. People who were staying home during lockdown found joy in owning their own machines. This expanded the market, creating customers for new machines but also increasing demand (and prices) for old machines from the original heyday of pinball. This in turn created a need for more people to learn to repair machines.
As a competitive pinball player myself, and a proud science and tech nerd (I worked as a science communicator for NASA), I’ve been fascinated to learn about pinball restoration from the experts.
The Rise of Space City Pinball
Chicago has long been the undisputed hub of pinball; many of the largest machine manufacturers, present and past, are located there, and the competitive scene is strong. But with the rise in pinball’s popularity, large pinball communities have popped up all around the world. Each of these communities require their own local repair and restoration heroes. Pinball machines are designed to be played thousands of times, but between getting beat on during serious competition and reluctantly used as tables in bars, many decades-old machines can present some strange repair challenges.
Houston, Texas, is one of those new pinball hubs that has arisen over the past 5 years. The sprawling city easily has five or more tournaments every week, and hosts the annual Houston Arcade and Pinball Expo. There are numerous public arcades and bars hosting machines, but the city is also home to a number of private collectors.
A hub to much of the Houston pinball community has formed around one of those collectors: Tim Hood. Tim and his wife Christine own more than 200 pinball machines, including some strange and unique machines that he has had shipped from Europe. Hood is one member of the close-knit group that call themselves the Wormhole Five: Tim and Christine, Jamie and Genine Burchell, and John Speights. During the pandemic they founded Wormhole, a private pinball club where the group could get together safely in their own Covid social bubble.
Wormhole has grown way beyond that and is now open to the public for three pinball tournaments a month, which they stream on Twitch. The tournaments give an opportunity for the Wormhole Five to share a couple dozen of their impressive, oddball collection of machines with the community.
Some of those are brand new, but many are vintage machines that require months of work behind the scenes from a dedicated team to get them ready for their Wormhole debut.
Picking a Machine to Restore
On a hot Houston summer day, I met Wormhole manager John Speights at the Vault, the Hoods’ storehouse of vintage pinball games. Speights has some of his games stored inside as well.
Tucked away on a side road in the Houston Heights, the Vault holds rows of folded-up pinball machines. Some were previously fixed up for Wormhole, others are currently being restored, and many more, shipped over from Europe and around the country, are yet to be opened.
Plastic sheeting still envelops many of the games including Bike Race (1992), Punk! (1982), and Capcom’s Pinball Magic (1995). Many are modern solid-state games, with a few electromechanical machines splashed in. Today’s the day that two of those packed-up machines get opened to begin their restoration process in the hopes of making it into Wormhole.
“Of the around 60 European games Tim’s gotten, we’ve only opened 10,” Speights said. “It’s hard to keep up, in a great way.”
The first step is to cut off the plastic ties keeping the folded-up games secure for transport and storage. From looking at the side Speights could tell one of the games is Halley Comet, a solid state manufactured in 1986 by Juegos Populares in Spain, but the other was hard to identify solely from the side art.
To figure out the height of legs needed, Speights measured existing machines that were at a comfortable play height. He went digging in the stack of pinball machine legs in the corner and emerged with 31½-inch legs. After testing, he went back to find ½-inch shorter legs to perfect the play feel.
With legs bolted on and the game standing, it was time to unfold the machines’ back boxes. With some help from some others working in the Vault, Speights got them open and attached any unplugged cables.
The mystery game was revealed to be Olympus, another Juegos Populares game of the same era with muscular Olympian gods featured on the back glass. Speights went into inspection mode on both machines and took notes that he’d text to Brian Foytik, Wormhole’s primary technician.
“I’ve learned that about 95% of pinball repair is observation,” Speights said. “The game quits working, and you’re like, ‘Oh no, I have no idea how to fix this.’ But in reality, if you take a moment, slide the glass off, lift the playfield up, look at the area that’s not working, you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s this thing that came off.’ A wire came loose or the spring is off. It’s things that you can observe and say, ‘Okay, I can fix that.’ It’s become less intimidating to me through watching people like Brian and seeing how he works on things.”
Upon lifting the playfields, both Olympus and Halley Comet showed oxidation, rust, and dirt on the metal switches inside, indicating they may have been housed near water. He checked for any board and battery corrosion and looked for any glaring problems like hanging cords, snapping some pictures of the boards to send to Foytik.
“Brian isn’t going to like this,” Speights said, looking at the oxidation inside.
But with the thumbs up from Foytik to turn them on to see what happens, he found a transformer to allow him to plug them in, as they both had European style plugs.
As he flicked the on switch to Halley Comet, lights and sound immediately came from the machine. The music sounded a bit strange, kind of like a blown-out speaker, but the game did seem to turn on.
“Anytime that we open a game up like that, we don’t know how long it’s been wrapped up. Maybe a month, maybe 17 years, we don’t know,” Speights said. “The fact that the game booted, we are 90% of the way there.”
Speights manually added a few credits onto the game using a lever inside the coin door, and hit the start button for a first test game.
There were some other obvious issues with Halley Comet — the plunger to launch the ball not being lined up, a drop target not going down, and some bulbs burnt out — but for the most part Speights was ready to pass this project off to Foytik as the next game to restore.
“Without Brian Foytik, the pinball community in the Houston area would not be near what it is, because he keeps a lot of these games alive that other people don’t know how to do,” Speights said. “He provides so much and he doesn’t ask for anything in return. He does it purely out of his love of pinball repair and seeing these games play.”
Getting a Pinball Machine Tournament Ready
A few nights later, I returned to the Vault with Foytik as he did his own inspection of Halley Comet and started the restoration process.
“This is what they would probably call a working project,” Foytik said. “It still needs some minor stuff done to the boards, like to change the electrolytic capacitors. Since they’re older, they will fail and they’ll leak out as well,” he explained. “That will bring it back up to like a newish condition.”
Foytik grew up around repair work. His dad, Clarence, was skilled at fixing everything from jukeboxes to pinball machines, but Foytik didn’t get interested in repairing pinball machines himself until after purchasing his first one, a Twilight Zone, in 2008.
“I wanted to learn and try to get some repair skills like he had,” Foytik said. “It was just amazing all the kinds of stuff that he worked on: tractors, engines, vehicles. He could fix almost anything electronic around the house. That’s what I want to try to get into and get as good as he was.”
Foytik got into supporting Wormhole and the Houston pinball community through another pair of Houston repair icons, the Dronets, who run UpKick Pinball. If you’ve got a big project, Elizabeth and David Dronet are who you reach out to first, and you send it to their house to be “UpKicked.” Foytik found joy in working on some of their projects.
“I was working on Tim’s games for at least for 10 months before he even knew I was working on them,” Foytik said. Now he leads the charge restoring Wormhole’s games in the Vault, as well as still working on his own personal projects.
With toolboxes at the ready and a magnetic light attached to the side of the Halley Comet machine, it was time to get started. First up on today’s repair docket: the plunger was so loose and off center that it couldn’t launch the ball to the top of the machine. This was an easy fix, using a screwdriver to relocate and tighten the plunger so that it would hit right in the center of the ball as it sits in the shooter lane. Being just a little off center can drastically change the plunger’s power.
The start button was also getting stuck, making the game start over right away when a game finished, and automatically adding extra players. This was fixed by just cleaning around the button and adjusting the switch a little bit that was right behind it.
Next was taking a look at individual switches on the underside of the playfield. Pinball machines of the solid-state era use numerous leaf switches that can be pressed by the ball to record points and send other signals. A few of this machine’s drop target switches needed cleaning. Foytik used a Flexstone file to do this, a small non-conductive file that he could run through the switch to take off any dirt and buildup. Many repair techs use an emery board or even just a business card for the same task.
Other switches needed closer attention, their metal contacts under the playfield loosened or tightened with needlenose pliers. Foytik would reach one arm around to the back of the lifted-up playfield and run his hand along the switches as he adjusted them. He was checking that the switch would fully depress and pop back up like it would need to if a ball ran over it.
Thankfully all the solenoid coils powering the flippers and bumpers seemed to be in decent condition, but Foytik did notice that one flipper appeared more powerful than the other. Rather than just swap the underpowered coil, he decided it would be worth it to track down two working coils to swap them on both flippers.
“If you just swap one, then the one that felt more powerful before will likely feel underpowered,” Foytik said.
Many of the small insert lamps that light up shots on the playfield were burnt out or dim. Using some rubbing alcohol and a paper towel he cleaned debris buildup off the plastic inserts, and then did some quick swaps of the bulbs for fresh LED lights.
Now it was time to take on the game’s weird crackling sound. One of the most convenient things you can have when fixing a pinball machine is another version of that game. And just by Foytik’s luck, Hood had purchased a second, worse-condition Halley Comet that had another soundboard inside that could be swapped into the original machine. The second machine was much worse for wear with spiderwebs galore, floppy flippers, and missing parts. But the sound board was intact.
With a quick unscrewing and screwing of a few bolts, a different soundboard was swapped into the main Halley Comet. Upon booting the game back up, the sound was a bit better, but still had some of the crackling.
Now Foytik decided to bring the circuit boards home to take a closer look, do some soldering, and swap out the capacitors. The only major hangup seems to be that Foytik can’t figure out how to get the game to change from five to three balls. Machines like this often have a setting to enable the change, but this one didn’t seem to work. And with how good Wormhole’s tournament players are, giving them five balls would make the games last way too long.
“Sometimes you find a small problem that you think is hard which ends up being easy. But other times you end up overthinking it and making it hard,” Foytik said. “So sometimes, if I have trouble, I usually leave it for another day.”
Although the game is getting close to being fixed up, it still needs a switches-and-lights test run to check on those last few switches that don’t seem to be triggering when a ball rolls over them. Some of the springs also need to be swapped on the few plastic drop targets that aren’t responding very strongly when they are supposed to pop down and up.
The final steps to finishing any pinball project are swapping out any of the older rubber pieces on the game that look close to breaking for new ones, giving the playfield a good cleaning and waxing, and finally doing some last play testing.
Photo by Brian Foytik
“It needs test plays — you need to hit all the switches again and again and again,” Speights said. “You’re sending electrical signals through these transistors from resistors that may not have received electricity in a long time. A lot of times they’ll fail, and then boom, another issue comes up. We have to trace it back, replace that resistor, and you’re back in business — until the next thing comes up.”
Wormhole isn’t going for aesthetic perfection with their games, but they are focused on getting the mechanics up and running.
“There are probably going to be more beautiful specimens out there of each individual game that we have here, but we want ours to play 100% and for you to be able to experience the game play as it was intended,” Speights said.
Keeping Pinball Machines Running
Wormhole hosts a number of tournaments every month attended by some of the best pinball players in Texas. They shake machines and will play them for hours on end, meaning things are going to break.
“It’s constant vigilance. When a game goes down, we wanna get on it as quickly as we can to get it back up and running,” Speights said. “Things are going to happen to these games. We’re not open to the public seven days a week, like a lot of places are. So they’re not getting that kind of play, but we have big tournaments here and we want them to be operational throughout the tournaments.“
Every Wormhole visitor can add any problems they come across during tournaments to the Board of Grievances, a whiteboard leaned against a large Burger King head. Issues can range from a light being burnt out on a solid state, to a coil catching fire on an electromechanical machine (this actually happened on a Spanish Eyes from 1972). During one October 2024 tournament, players noted that the trough on Swords of Fury wasn’t registering that a ball drained properly, and Taxi had a three-bank of drop targets on the right side that were not resetting.
Every Wednesday, the Wormhole team tries to clear the board and do general maintenance. (You can check out a Twitch stream of one of their Tech Nights.)
“First, we have to replace rubbers when they break. That is the sort of thing that is common maintenance. Then we always want to be cleaning those playfields and keeping the coil dust that gets carried up from the balls from maybe the tunnels underneath back up, and you wanna just keep things clean and waxed,” Speights said.
There are a number of eras of pinball machines and they are all vastly different, so different members of the community come in to help with a variety of issues and machines.
Travis Moseman, a former NASA engineer, stops by and helps with issues or updates to more modern games. You can find him updating the code on Wormhole’s Labyrinth machine, created by Houston-based pinball manufacturer Barrels of Fun, for whom he now works. He and his partner Clint Warren even took on a massive project of taking a modern machine that was unfinished by its original manufacturer and making it fully operational.
And then you’ll see Wormholer Cory Westfahl over on the side helping with cleaning the machines.
Got a strange electromechanical issue? It’s time to call up Spence Gaskin.
“I’ve gravitated towards old stuff overall in life, and I like the simpler things I can work on, like, I can’t work on it, but I’m talking to you on a flip phone,” Gaskin said during a phone interview.
Since electromechanical games don’t have any circuit boards or computers in them, there are a lot of moving parts. Repairing them requires a lot of inspecting old schematics, and of trial and error.
“People say I’m great at what I do, but it’s really just there aren’t a lot of people doing it, and they’re scared they’re going to electrocute themselves,” Gaskin said. “I’m willing to mess around with it and do all that.”
If the issue is too large or you want something custom done to the machine, that’s when it’s time to ship out the game to UpKick.
“We don’t just repair machines. We make stuff for machines. I personally make a lot of apron cards. He cuts a lot of laser pieces,” Elizabeth said about her husband David.
“Elizabeth’s got an eye for color and art and can put a game together and make it look really nice. I think she enjoys the aspect of breaking it down to clean,” David said.
So with that deep team of experts to call on, and a weekly schedule of repairs, Wormhole is able to stay up and running.
The Future of Pinball
Wormhole’s long-term goal is to get almost all of the 200-machine collection up and working so that they can fill Wormhole East, a pinball museum the group is working on and hopes to open in downtown Houston in a few years. The scale of this project represents the growth of pinball in this community.
Pinball is a fun game, but a lot of the growth of the hobby in Houston and the world all comes back to the people.
“Everyone here has been super supportive, and I don’t think I’m an amazing catch, but they have super boosted me and my enthusiasm for the game and made me feel super useful,” Gaskin said.
With the Covid effect on the hobby wearing off, it is uncertain whether pinball will be able to continue to sustain large amounts of growth. But for now, the need for repair techs and those with the knowledge of 1960s–1990s electronics is high. UpKick constantly has a waiting list and Foytik is running around town multiple days a week, in addition to his full-time job, helping different groups with their machines.
The Wormhole Five have goals to use their museum to help support more people in the community gaining pinball repair skills as well. There are a number of resources for learning pinball repair skills now, but in-person experience is still the best.
“It’s a challenge trying to show people how I got this thought process to understand what’s going on, how to visualize what needs to be worked on, and how to get to the needed area quicker,” Foytik said.
If you want to find a pinball community or repair classes near you, check out the International Flipper Pinball Association for a list of tournaments, and Pinball Map for a crowdsourced map of all the pinball machines in your area.
If you can’t get out to a local spot, check out the resources on Mark Gibson’s amazing Fun With Pinball website, and join the online forums at Pinside to get started.
Photos by Erin Winick Anthony
This article appeared in Make: Vol. 92. Subscribe for more maker projects and articles!
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