This page includes info regarding my 1979 Gottlieb Pinball Pool Pinball game.  I bought this game in March of 2007 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 a while 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 deterioration. 

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 cabinet 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 in early 2008, and he was interested in watching a Stevebo shop job, so I told him we should restore my Pinball Pool so he could learn about what goes in to shopping a game. He came over in April of 2008 and 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 also helped re-target one of the target banks (yikes, lots of targets on this game!), added new coil sleeves, replace the pop bumpers after cleaning, shoped the flippers, magic erasered the playfield.  After meeting Abrie and spending time shopping my game, we ended up doing a couple more games including one of his games (Secret Service). We've stayed in touch and I consider Abrie to be a good friend.

Note: I ended up selling this Pinball Pool for $1200 because I bought a HUO Pinball Pool from Kim Mitchell in April of 2009. Kim's game was beyond HUO. It had literally come out of the box to be set up. Required a new set of boards due to battery corrosion, but Kim bought a Pascal Janin board for the game and I really made out on the game.

(click picture to enlarge)

Pinball Pool Flyer

Center captive ball area.
Left center side of the playfield. Note the wear on the rack.	Right center area of the playfield.
Right slingshot area.	Rack area showing wear.
Center area with plastics removed.	Left target bank area with plastics removed.
Upper left area with plastics removed. Note the kickout wear.	Upper right area with plastics removed. Kickout wear on this side too.
Lower playfield area with no plastics or apron.	Left flipper area with plastics removed.
Upper left area, no plastics.	Center lane area, no plastics.
Ball trough area, plastics removed.
Playfield stripped, center area.	Playfield stripped, center left area.
Playfield stripped, pop bumper area.	Long view of stripped playfield. Only thing left to do is remove both target banks.
Underside view showing the flippers with only the ball eject removed.	Another view of the underside of the playfield near the slingshots.
Underside of playfield showing pop bumper area.	Pop bumper light bulb wires before desoldering.
Upper left kickout mechanism.	Upper right kickout mechanism.
Lower underside of playfield showing slingshots removed.	Both pop bumpers removed from underside of playfield.
Left flipper view from the underside of the playfield.	Right flipper view from the underside of the playfield.
Finished upper playfield.	Finished upper left playfield.
Finished right target bank.	Finished left target bank.
Finished lower playfield.	Finished eight ball area.
Backglass