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I worked for my uncle who had a coin-op business. We had a few old mech pinballs. They weighed a ton!

They had zillion contacts to clean I'd just spray contact cleaner and come back later. Many parts were Bakelite like cams and spinning things with contacts that would touch as things rotated. Bakelite was impossible to fix and was brittle as hell in the mid 1980s now it must be dust.

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I only enjoy playing the mechanical ones. All the noises, clanking, ka-chunking they make is where the fun is.

And the smell of hot oil, trace ozone, and old wood add to the experience.

Same, although I don't miss the old gaslighting of lost flipper hits on poorly maintained tables (such as when pressing the flipper button doesn't sufficiently make enough contact to trigger the flipper). It kills me that they're so expensive still.

The tiny spark when the contacts open slowly erode the contact surface away.

That was my job as a teen to fix. I had to sand away the burned on crud and then use the "bendy tool" (slotted small L shaped wrench) to adjust the contact gap.

An RC combination across the points will reduce the sparking substantially.

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