00:00I'm Dr Pimble, they called me that because after my apprenticeship in electronics when I was about
00:0516-17 years old I earned extra money repairing pinball machines in arcades at the coast,
00:11but I kept my brown jacket on that I used to wear in the factory to keep my clothes clean
00:15and walking in with that on and a set of test leads around my neck I somehow picked up the
00:19nickname Dr Pimble. I went through what most people do as they get older, family and all the
00:24rest of it and then about 20 years ago I went to see a customer of mine and in the corner of his
00:30room was a broken pinball machine and I remarked I used to repair them and ended up taking it home
00:35in the back of the car and that sent me back down the rabbit hole and I've been kind of running
00:40pinball repairs ever since and somehow it's grown into what we call now the pinball surgery.
00:46The number of machines I've fixed, well several hundred in different people's houses
00:51and I've owned almost 180-200 machines of my own so it's got to be around about 500 machines
00:57one way or the other. Pimble's making a comeback because it's a very social thing. Although people
01:03do sit around and play these on their own they tend to be a family game and they also are very
01:08heavy to move around so it's easy to go to somebody else's to do something different or go to a club
01:13where there are other things and let's face it these tables started life in coffee bars
01:18and student union bars where people used to literally play them while they waited for their
01:22friends to arrive and then when their friends did they turned into a kind of beer mat table
01:26or coffee table. I'm often asked if there's a machine I haven't been able to repair
01:31and the truthful answer is that pinballs are rather like cars. As they get older the parts get
01:36harder to get hold of but these days we have the luxury of being able to fabricate in plastic using
01:423D printing and there are plenty of small engineering companies so it's not a question
01:47of whether you can fix it or not it's a question of how long do you want to spend going to all the
01:52trouble of fabricating the parts to get them working. Some are more modern some are older
01:57but if I had to be pinned down it would probably be the 90s machine Medieval Madness by Williams.
02:03It's a great favourite of mine because it has a very python-esque theme and a lot of very silly
02:07call-outs and sound effects. I've had people who really want to spend money to get a machine back
02:15to better than factory condition and the reason is that it means something to them.
02:21They've either proposed their wife over that machine in an arcade years ago and found it again
02:25or that machine was in their student union bar or their rugby club or the coffee shop that was just
02:30down the road and means something to them. There's a big retro vibe going on at the moment which is
02:34driving pinball uptake and I think that type of thing for some people particularly whose children
02:41have grown up and left home and left them with a free space for a pinball machine
02:45has kind of brought them into it.
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