Is there a financial point where just buying a new Playfield is better than repairing the old one then add clear cost ? Assuming the new playfield is a avail then u have international ship costs plus purchase.
Must be a close call on some jobs. Which do you do, restore or replace ?
Is that a valid question ? For others thinking about this process. ?
The work is amazing.
Prior to taking on any High End Restoration, part of the research is to ascertain if a NOS playfield is available, or, if CPR are looking to reproduce this title. Being the CPR Distributor, I knew the plastics set was coming, and there are no immediate plans to repro the playfield or backglass "at this time". This may change in the future - but at the time this opportunity presented itself, it was not an option. Even if it was, there's at least an 18 month wait for CPR to complete their current pre order list. Given my playfield is one of the four, I would not wait anyway - and I can assure you, this would not be an option for the other owners.
Looking from the point of view of repro VS restored.
If there are no plans to repro, then restoration is the ONLY method. I sat on my playfield for 3 years. If Tim and Stu were not going to restore mine, I'd wait until a repro is done, or, source a NOS. Wait until you see the "before" and "after" photos on mine - there's no way anyone would attempt that. If I was to send overseas to Bill Davis etc - there's at least a 5 year wait. I'm not even sure they would accept it. BEFORE I bought the game off Wotto, i was promised a NOS from a well known Pinball Collector - that turned out to be a pipedream (Not Wotto).
So let's assume a repro IS available. Landing a playfield from CPR is around $1100 per playfield - that includes shipping at the current Aussie dollar rate. The old playfield still has to be removed and replaced with the repro. So labour casts to do this are the same for REPRO and RESTORED. The restoration of these playfields is slightly more than that.
The options are ;
Leave "as is" and just play the game.
Restore the game as "best effort" with what is available at the time.
In this case, there is no option. Given I've seen Tim and Stu's work, I have no problem with the restoration over waiting years for a repro that might never happen, as it provides the Embryon owners with the best possible outcome. What is often overlooked, it the amount of hours that are spent simply prepping the games - it takes 8 hours just to STRIP the playfield. Documentation takes time - this is BEFORE Tim and Stu have the blank playfield.
Some owners WANT their original playfields restored. So even if a repro is available, they still want their restored.
I just received Evel Knievel playfields, and they are amazing. this could be the only field worth a repro as it is predominatly white, and would need a lot of work on an original, but I digress..
I hope i answered the question !
