Another vintage project...

Anything vintage and mechanical piques my interest.  So when I saw this vintage, mechanical Pachinko game my buddy found, my interest was piqued.  It was in pretty good shape but wasn't functioning 100 percent.  The hammer and feeding mechanisms were right but the jackpot payout wasn't working, so he brought it in to the shop and we torn into it.

Pachinko is a foreign cousin to the slot machines in some respect.  In their heyday, they were used by many as a recreation, often times with an element of gambling involved.  The early models were completely mechanical and gravity-driven so pretty straight forward in terms of the internal workings.  The intricacies of the springs and levers matches that of the mechanical aspects of the photobooth and shares a certain autonomous quality.

It was a fun project stripping it down, learning the workings, and then reassembling it.  After a short time we had it working like a charm and gave us a great excuse to turn the shop into a makeshift Pachinko parlor for an evening.

Pachinko!