My daughter-in-law Christine comes from a military family. As a child she lived in Japan in the ‘60s and early 70’s with her parents and two sisters. When they moved back to the States, one of the items they brought back was a “Pachinko”game machine.
This was 1976 and the machine has not been in working condition for 40 years or so. Christine ended up with it in her basement closet along with other forgotten treasures. Recently she ran across it while cleaning and was going to junk it. Upon further consideration she decided to see if she could find someone who could restore it and put it back in working condition.
Pachinko is similar to pinball, but the machine stands upright instead of horizontal and is normally built into the wall like a window so the player cannot get into the “works”.
The game is played by flipping the spring-loaded lever on the lower right. The path of the ball is controlled by the distance the lever is moved.
According to Christine, there are numerous Pachinko parlors in Tokyo and other Japanese cities, and the people are quite addicted to playing it. She asked me if I would look at this thing, telling me that I was the only person she could think of that could possibly fix it. After a compliment like that I could hardly refuse. Besides, it looked interesting, and the best example of a “Rube Goldberg device” I had ever seen.
The back of the machine showing “the works”
Close-up showing wiring, counterweight, and one of the microswitches. Rube Goldberg would be proud!
I had been in Tokyo in 1955 courtesy of the U.S. Army but I don’t remember seeing any of these Pachinko machines, so the first thing I needed to do was to figure out how this thing worked and what it was supposed to do. I went to the place where all lost tinkerers go for information – YouTube.com. There I discovered a wealth of information. I found that there had been several companies in Japan that built these things and they had been updated and modernized throughout the years. Many had been removed from the parlors in Tokyo and shipped to the U.S. by various companies with some of the parts removed. Some showed up in arcades in cities like New York and Wilmington, others wound up in private homes.
According to the information on YouTube, Pachinko works like this: The game is played by shooting steel balls through the machine. The player buys a number of these balls from the house, inserts them into the machine, and shoots them through. If he is lucky a ball goes into a jackpot slot that releases an extra number of balls from the jackpot reservoir to the player. The player can either play these or turn them in to the house for prizes or cash.
Upon inspecting the machine, I found several broken parts, cut electrical wires, corroded contacts, dust bunnies, spider poop, and jammed up rusty steel balls wedged in the works. I unjammed, cleaned, re-wired, glued and rebuilt broken parts. I also added a 9 volt power supply and a stand to keep it from falling over.
I loaded up the jackpot hopper and shot a few balls. The bells rang, the lights flashed, and the jackpot paid off. Life is good!
I have been playing the Pachinko machine for several days now. So far I have made about 4 million bucks. I think I’ll try to rack up a few more million before I give it back to Christine.