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.