To Pete Deardorff, all pinball machines look the same. He doesn't get caught up in distractions like the flashing lights or the buzzers and bells, because when you open one up and flip up the play field, they're all made up of the same components.
"They're different, but they've all got flippers, they've all got lights, they've all got switches and solenoids, so in a sense, each game is the same game to me," says Deardorff. It takes some of the romance out of it, he admits, but as a pinball repair technician it helps to eliminate distraction when troubleshooting a broken machine.
Deardorff's flirtation with pinball repair began in 1996, when his college roommate bought several pinball machines from a classified ad.
One by one, the machines began to break down over time. When the seller refused to help, Deardorff began tinkering with the machines to see if he could fix them himself. With a background in electronics and the help of some parts vendors online, he dove right in and it wasn't long before he was fixing other people's machines on the weekends.
"There's no telling how many hundreds of these I've actually had my hands on," said Deardorff, who took his pinball repair business full-time in 2001. He's seen everything from old mechanical pinball machines without complex electronics to modern, brand-new machines.
"Unfortunately, there's no real school to go to for this kind of stuff, you just have to pick it up," Deardorff said, so he is entirely self taught. The process was sometimes painful, he says, with some occasional costly mistakes, but luckily most pinball machines have schematics that can help with troubleshooting.
Though he has scaled back the number of machines he works on since starting work full time at Volkswagen in 2012 (he fixes about a dozen a year now and maintains others for clients) he said his natural curiosity for electrical devices is what keeps him working, and almost two decades after he first began, this pinball wizard still finds himself a part of the machine.