I worked for Hankin's in Brisbane for around 2 years as a tech back in the 80's, I was always fixing these machines in their leisure centres, one in the Valley and the other one upstairs at the top end of Queen Street, when the centres closed they put me in the workshop at Bowen Hills.
I hated the Hankin pinball machines with a passion, always breaking down, driver board faults, cpu board faults,random coil lock on's and burnt coils and stuff, one day when I was off work sick an apprentice went out to do a service call and did not have a fuse to fix "Howaz" so he put an allen key in it's place, bugger me it burnt the power supply and the driver pcb like hot chips in a fry pan. Management sucked there and no room for advancement so I left Hankins and started my own business, my comment is I found all their games to be sleepy and boring, but I guess that was Australia's answer to pinball.
I think with the advancement of ic's and printed circuit boards these days Australia could make a much better pinball machine if there was indeed a market for them, I have built my own video pinball machine "Silverball Secrets" based on vp .
Hey Bossgp - we probably knew each other back in those days - I was a TV tech and Musictime employed me the minute electronic machines hit the market. I don't remember having "that" many issues with Hankin machines, I most likely called you for advice from time to time?
I know that I hated electronic Gottliebs with a passion! Stupid coil faults, idiodic choice of 'spider' chips (that was complete madness) - all manner of random resets that could never be tracked down and to top it off the games were mostly rubbish to play. I really doubt that Musictime ever made a dollar out of the Gottliebs - at least the Hankin machines had some appeal to local players.
