I am currently waiting on pics from another Booster owner that might shed some light on what I need. If anyone has any ideas on what mech woul work, I'm all ears. Getting a coil and kicker shouldn’t be too hard. So, I now need to find two curled spring steel pieces with their matching posts to get the game back to original. But that’s not all, someone also altered the curled springs on the playfield to compensate for this. My kicker assembly is entirely gone At some point it must have been removed and bypassed. Pretty sophisticated for this era I think. If you can manage to get the ball to fal into the cup, a switch is made and a kicker sends the ball back up to the top of the playfield where it hits a home run coil that is impossible to make any other way. Now, the really cool part! On the playfield there is another diamond and at home plate there is a metal cup. An animated back glass diamond reinforces this and keeps track of your score. What’s great about booster is that, unlike Bumper, it now had a real theme baseball!Įvery bumper hit counted as a single base hit and 4 would get you a run. As they hit each of the bumpers, a contact would be hit (think of the board game Operation) and a score was counted.īumper was a huge deal and the company started making several games with similar features. To give you a sense of how old this really is, the newly invented ‘steel spring’ was used to create a coil that would make balls bounce around. I think Bally really made a great stride with their 1936 game Bumper! They had just designed the first ‘bumper’ and what better name for the game that carried this new invention.

If anyone has the knowledge or part I may need, please shoot me a PM.įor now, my primary focus will be on the 1937 Bally Booster and the 1947 GTB Humpty Dumpty… although, if anyone has access to original price and instruction cards for the 1933 Ballyhoo, I would love to get some high res pictures or a scan! I will cover each needy machine in detail with its own follow-up post after this intro. And, while some of them might be in fine shape, a few of them will really need some attention. Parts and expertise for many of these games can be scarce. I’ve sort of taken on a mission to preserve, repair and maintain some of these older machines and, even though it may take me some time, I would like to ask for any help that may be out there. I now have just about every major iteration of the game represented from depression era mechanical games to pre-war/pre-flipper machines with electrical contacts… a post-war early flipper pin to early ‘score reel’ games and finally, the EM pinnacle: single player ‘wedgehead’ EMs. Then, I stumbled upon the very significant GTB Humpty Dumpty from 1947 (first game with electric flippers) and, as of this last weekend, I completed my little historical collection with my first and only pre-flipper electric game, 1937 Bally Booster. I then happened upon a couple of 1930s bagatelle games Five Star Final and Ballyhoo (first game produced by Bally and how they got their name). I first grabbed a 1959 Pinch Hitter with the classic Williams running man unit, then decided that I wanted to find a space-themed woodrail (of all things). In the last few months I have expanded my EM collection and now have several that I would call ‘historically significant’. Wow, I’ve got a few woodrails to restore….Man, restoring that old EM was a lot of fun… I wonder how hard it would be to work on a woodrail? Maybe I need one, or two, or three.Damn, that 2” flipper game was awesome.I really don’t care for anything pre 1970’s.Wow, these older machines are kinda tough… I think I need one, or two, or three.Wow, these older machines look pretty cool.I think I can squeeze a 20th machine into that corner….Ooooh, there are forums with other local collectors?.I think I can squeeze a 5th game into that corner….Well, having just one machine would be boring….So… how much does an Addams Family cost?.Oh wow! You can actually own a pinball machine… in your house?.My time in the hobby has gone something like this: It seems I am currently on a historical kick and finding and restoring historically significant pieces has become as interesting to me as restoring a modern DMD. It’s even more unique when that machine has a special place in pinball history. However, there is a small difference between restoring a game to make it beautiful and play better and restoring a game to physically ‘save it’ or bring it back to its original glory. Many of you here share my passion for restoring these great machines we all love.

Pinch hitter tabletop pinball machine