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This page includes info regarding my 1979 Gottlieb Pinball Pool Pinball game. I bought this game for $450 from a local person here in Denver, Colorado who had the game stored in a "porch" that was enclosed, but not heated. When I first saw the game, it was standing on end and the game box didn't look that bad. From what I could see of the playfield, it had some wear around the lower multiplier inserts and a couple others above that, but other than these wear problems, everything else looked dirty, but fine. I offered the guy $450 for the game and wish I could have given him more since he was a nice guy, but the game simply wouldn't be worth much more than that price since it didn't work, needed repairs, probably a new CPU board, and a serious cleaning. There was lots of what I would describe as "mud" on the playfield glass and it took quite awhile to get this cleaned up. The "mud" had also made it to the underside of the playfield glass and was covering some of the playfield. The light was low where I was viewing the game, and although the backbox glass artwork looked pretty good, it turned out that once I got the game home, spent more time removing the "mud," and looked at it a little closer, there was more flaking than what I first thought. Not a lot of flaking but more than no flaking. The backside of the backglass had what appeared to be "mud" on it too. I removed the glass before moving the game downstairs to the main game storage area, and very lightly used a wet rag to dab at the mud where no flaking appeared (when seen from the front-side of the backglass) to remove it. I got most of the dirt off of it, but there were some places where the artwork was lifting. Not just a little lifting, but in one place around several inches square. Per the usual Gottlieb games of this era, the flesh, red, and purple colors had small flecks also missing. I shot the backside of the backbox glass with Krylon triple-thick several times to keep it from getting any worse. At least the glass could be handled without worrying about further deteoriation. Once I lifted the playfield, I was pleasantly surprised to see the original manual (that also included the schematic) still in the game. The underside of the playfield and inside the gamebox looked quite clean which was surprising since there seemed to be so much "mud" on the playfield glass as well as the playfield and backbox glass. I cleaned all of this up, vacuumed out the game, polished the rather nice legs that came with the game, and then moved it downstairs. The targets on the game were mostly there, but someone had replaced a few with other targets that didn't match the game. I bought new ones from Steve Young at PBR since new ones always look so much nicer. I met a new pinhead and nice guy named Abrie, and he was interested in watching a Stevebo shop job, so he stripped down one side of the playfield and I did the other. All parts from the top of the playfield were thrown in a bowl for polishing later in a Berry tumbler, and the underside screws that were removed were thrown in a magnetic bowl for later cleaning as well. All coil springs, smaller metal parts, screws, rollover switch wires, wireforms, pop bumper light bulb sockets, and basically any metal removed from the upper and lower playfield small enough to fit in the tumbler will be cleaned as well. Abrie will also help re-target one of the target banks (yikes, lots of targets on this game!), add new coil sleeves, replace the pop bumpers after cleaning, shop the flippers, magic eraser the playfield, and if I can, I'll even con him in to doing touchup work on the center rack as well. Abrie's a nice guy so I'll have to be careful he doesn't end up doing all the work or I'll never see him again :o)
Pinball Pool Flyer
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