Shopping White Water, Part 4: Pre-shop Condition

August 13, 2018

Shopping White Water, Part 4: Pre-shop Condition

I bought my White Water off of eBay back in 2004. The game was 12 years old at the time of purchase. Like many "pinball newbies" at that time thought, eBay seemed like the only place to buy pinball machines. Bally/Williams had closed, and Stern was barely hanging on. Craigslist didn't exist yet. The reality was that many of the games sold on eBay were "junk pins", re-imports that were badly abused, with sellers looking to flip them by hiding their true condition.

I bought mine from a seller named Ronnie Miller, or "tilyous" on eBay, who advertised the game as "nice" and "shopped". Do a search on the rec.games.pinball group on Google for Ronnie Miller to see what other people thought of him. I found Ronnie to be polite and quick to respond, but I think his auction page was a bit misleading, and his advice on fixing the machine was ultimately unhelpful. His insistent claim was this: "that was the best looking WW that I have seen so far, in person." Here are the initial problems I diagnosed in an email to Ronnie after 9 days of use and generally looking around (I had no idea what to thoroughly look for until years later):

the lights in the topper stopped working
the DMD was garbled and unreadable
the increase volume button inside the coin door didn't work
3 Boulders in the playfield were cracked and 2 had gaping holes in the top
15 lights around the playfield either did not work or were completely missing
the ball did not always eject to the plunger and the machine had to be tilted to get it out
there were two screw holes on the outside of the cabinet on the right-hand side
there was a big chip in the playfield in front of the Lost Mine kickout
the spring was almost gone on the left flipper and it would frequently stick
the inside of the cabinet was dirty, smelled like cigarette smoke and had broken glass in it

Some of these issues were minor, and some possibly happened during shipping. But some of them were inexcusable for a "shopped" machine. The reset problem appeared about 4 months later. I would estimate that I had put less than 40 plays on the machine in total, since I had purchased it, before every game would reset and I finally gave up. It went into storage in early 2005 and I focused on Scared Stiff, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Popeye, and Junkyard over the next several years, as they were mostly functional (although I later found that Creature also had its share of issues and it was an eBay purchase too).

A new Mirco playfield!

In 2013 I started taking apart the machine to clean and repair it, which I documented in this post. I found a damaged upper playfield, abused ramps, and broken mountains. I also found playfield planking, which discouraged me from moving forward. Planking happens when the plywood of the playfield swells and contracts due to temperature and/or humidity changes. Wear on the playfield will actually accelerate this process, and for some reason, as others have pointed out on Pinside, White Water is especially prone to planking. If this condition affects only the finish, it can be fixed, but if the underlying wood is affected, it is a very difficult to near-impossible fix. Mine was down to the wood, so I abandoned the shop job and the game continued to languish in storage.

It wasn't until I found out that Mirco was making reproduction playfields that I saw a ray of hope. I saved up some money and bought one, so the shopping of White Water began to move ahead. As I pulled items off of the old playfield, I couldn't believe how poorly this game was maintained, and it looked like it had never been cleaned. Remember, I only played a few dozen games, so these conditions were pre-existing to my ownership. Here are photos of the condition of some of the playfield parts: