Three of the best

Now you can't tell me that these aren't three of the nicest machines from the Bally Bingo catalogue!

Was it worth it...?

Well judge for yourself...

The playfield...

A lot of work went into trying to get this right but after rubbing the woodwork down and varnishing it, Chris took the executive decision to use one of Chris Dade's marvellous playfield overlays. looking at it, it has to have been the right decision..it looks great.

It's all coming together...

Check out the door of the cabinet and the nice new Red and Yellow bezels round the buttons and the coin return slot. All lovingly prepared and and finished.

But not finished yet...

Now there's all the work to do on the woodwork. The woodrails, the wooden bars on the head holding the backglass in place, the footrail and also installing the bright, shiny NOS buttons that I got from Wayne, the Duke of OK in America.

The cabinet...

Has been stripped down, a base coat applied and then repainted using stencils and matching colours as near to the originals as possible...again scroll back for the 'before' and 'after' comparison

Isn't that lovely...

Now you need to scroll back and check out what it was like in its original condition...then you can begin to appreciate the work that's gone into getting it to this condition

The cabinet door..

Also has numerous relays, switches and motors all of which require the same fantastic attention to detail

And now...

Check out how good it looks now...but there's been a considerable amount of time, effort and heartache to get it looking like this.

Good man, Chris!

Now more of the same

This is a typical 'before' picture of the inside of the head of a Bingo machine that's going to be restored. It's all there but needs some considerable work to pull it back from it's 'distressed' state to something that will work properly again after perhaps 20 years of being stored.

OK, now what?

Everything that should be there is there but it's been a matter of closely examining everything to see what's immediately apparent that needs fixing or replacing. Then it's down to putting the machine on test to find out those switches, coils relays, motors etc that need further work. This shows the result of all that work. It looks great!

I know I put it somewhere..

Chris is a fantastic Bingo mechanic and so he's stripping out the electro-mechanicals to examine them, clean or replace them and put them back in place.....

Complicated? You betcha!

The head...

Same as before, Chris said that all-in-all it was in reasonable condition...

What do you think?

OK, it's a project machine...

So not looking great but as Chris said 'It's OK, it's recoverable and will look great when it's finished'.

I don't know......

So it begins...

Now I know there's a Sun Valley in here somewhere!

The latest addition - a Sun Valley

A year after I first spoke about it with Chris howard (a fantastic Bally Bingo mechanic and friend) he has completely restored and refurbished a Sun Valley for me.

So as with the Key West and County Fair, I'll share with you the restoration process but before that gets under way I thought you'd like to see a picture of the machine in it's wonderful, finished condition