Back in 1994, my wife was traveling on business and out of town for a couple of weeks.
During that time, I thought it might be interesting to document the complete restoration of a Mills Castle Front slot machine.
So armed with an 8mm Sony camcorder, I went out to the shop and painstakingly documented the complete restoration of the Castle Front.
When I say complete, I mean complete!! The tape showed the following:
Mechanism Teardown
Cabinet Teardown
Jackpot Teardown
Escalator Teardown
Cabinet Refinishing
Casting Polishing / Painting
How to clean all the inidividual parts
Theory of operation, AKA how the thing actually works
Cabinet Reassembly
Mechanism Reassembly
Jackpot Reassembly
Escalator Reassembly
Final Adjustments
It was an incredible amount of work, but the end result was an 8 hour
VHS tape which documented the entire process.
I made 50 copies of the tape and sold them through the Coin-Op magazines that were around at the time (all are now out of business).
The tapes quickly sold out and I never made any more. I received many requests to do the same for Watling, Pace, and Jennings machines. People especially wanted the sections on mechanism tear down, and, more importantly, mechanism reassembly. Unfortunately, I have no plans to do this. You would not believe the amount of effort that went into making the first tape.
I mainly did it to see if it could be done and never intended to make a lot of money off of it. Both goals were met
.
Anyway, I periodically still get asked about that video tape from people who would like to purchase it. The answer is the same, no plans on making more copies.
However, a few weeks ago, I was cleaning the office and came across the master tapes. Being somewhat of a technology geek, I wondered how much work it would be to take the master tapes and digitally remaster them and save them to a DVD.
Well, one thing led to another, and after spending hours on the computer working with the tapes, they were finally all remastered.
I now have all the segments of the documentary in digital form. They actually turned out very well, the videos and the sound are amazingly good quality (if I do say so myself). I wish I would have held up as well as the tapes did
.
I am now in the process of organizing the segments and the end result will probably be a set of DVDs.
Anyway, there are fewer people around now who restore machines than there were 14 years ago when the original tape was made. I am not taking on any more projects myself because I have enough stuff in the pipeline to keep me busy for the next 5 years.
I get calls every week from people wanting a machine restored or a machine put back together because the husband tore it apart and all the parts are now in a bucket and he cannot figure out how to get it back together again. This call is usually from the wife who is
ed with her husband 
.
Needless to say, there is some demand, albeit limited, for this product.
Therefore, I am seriously considering making the DVDs commercially available.
Stay tuned for updates on the progress of this little project.
If you want to be notified when (if???) the DVDs are available, then let me know.
Just out of curiosity, I wondered if I could take the new masters and convert them to a format which will work on my iPhone. As it turns out this is very possible and the entire documentary can be viewed on an iPhone. Not sure how useful this is but it is definitely interesting.
