Author: metatron

A unique machine where you earn chips for your bonus and you can bet those chips during gameplay.

The song is sung by Steve Richie – the designer of this and many other pinball machines.

Zaccaria Supersonic is a single player, add-a-ball, pinball machine from Italy. I love the artwork on this one. Even though it came out in 1977, it has a groovy 60’s vibe.

Fun machine to play.

I was contacted by a couple that had two “old pinball machines” in storage. They thought one worked and one did not. Apparently about 25 years ago 10 pinball machines were found in a warehouse on Powell Street in Vancouver. This couple decided to take two of them home. They played them for about 10 years until they were retired to storage space in their house. That’s where they sat until I showed up – shoved in the back corner, covered in dust, surrounded by boxes and other unused items.

The two machines were Dealer’s Choice and Jumping Jack.

Dealer’s Choice was the machine they thought worked. Before I showed up the woman plugged it in and tried to start a game. It lights up, the repeater motor cycles, but that’s about it. The woman said “Lights come on but no one is home.”

I don’t think it will take much to get this one going.

The cabinet and backglass are in great shape. All plastics are intact. The pop bumper skirts are well chipped up and I’ll need to replace those. One pop bumper cover has a bite taken out of it. The playfield is dirty but there is minimal wear on the paint. After I clean the playfield I think I’m just going to touch up the black around the inserts with enamel. I don’t think I’ll bother with the other colours. They used a special UV reactive paint on the playfield which might be hard to match.

This 1951 Williams Harvey pinball machine used to live in a restaurant in Surrey BC named 50’s Burger and Pizza. I bought it from a guy who’s brother used to work there. The machine was non-working and the restaurant owners gave it to the brother (it was that or throw it away). The brother couldn’t get it working so he gave it to his brother (the fellow I bought it from) and he tinkered away on it and got it running. He said he knew nothing about pinball machines. He just followed the wires around and figured it out. I expected the underside to be jury rigged to death, but it isn’t. He did a pretty good job.

The one fantastic thing about this machine in it’s current condition is the ingenuity of the rubber rings. It’s pretty common to see rubber bands as makeshift replacements. Someone cut pieces of surgical tubing and held them together with glass buss fuses. It actually works fairly well.

It is missing the coin door, coin plunger, a pop bumper cap and the lockdown bar. Other than that, it looks complete.

The one sad thing is the backglass. At some point someone decided to paint blue enamel in the places the ink had flaked off. It is going to take some time to carefully remove this.

It would take a bit of work to get this restored, but I’m not going to restore it. I’m going to leave it in it’s current state (although I might make a coin door for it). There is something cool about the history of this machine.

I will bring this to the arcade from time to time as a display piece.