#25 Fathom The Classic Pinball Podcast

“It's my favorite classic Valley for sure. And it's right up there as one of my favorites of all time.”

“I opened up the back box, and the back glass of the original is just flawless. Like, I couldn't believe it was an original. And then following that, I looked at the MTU, of course, and it's legitimately probably the most acid damage I had ever seen on an MTU.”

“It's my pride and joy. It's right in my living room. First thing you see when you open my house, my front door, you come in and there's a fathom that just looks brand new, all chromed out.”

“There's something about it, I try to describe it to people, it's almost, to me, it's just heart and passion that I see in these old games with the artwork and the rule sets and doing what they were doing with the limited technology they had at the time period really amazes me.”

“Ron basically lays on a layer of clear and then he waits a really solid amount of time in between adding another layer of clear in addition to doing block sanding in between every coat too. And he said it just allows it to get so hard that his play fields virtually don't dimple.”

“It's really amazing to see the people that are the best at whatever it is they do, do their thing. You know, that's why the Olympics are so popular for television still, I think, where it's amazing people who can do anything at an excessively skilled level. That's what Ron does with his play fields.”

“I was incredibly fortunate that I was able to find it, get it, buy it, make the deal for the play field. Then I dropped it off to my buddy Dane in roughly October... And then I was just going to pick it up for him at the Kalamazoo show, which is always in April. So he had it for about six months.”

“I had Chris from Hot Rod Arcades, Mike Chestnut's protege, do all the chrome work on the game. And it was one of those things where originally we were just going to do the side rails and the coin door lockdown bar... next thing we knew like anything that could be chromed on that game was shiny.”

“I know he's actually working a little bit with Spooky Pinball right now in that some of Spooky's specific customers who also are customers of Ron they sending the play fields before they installed in their machines to Ron so he can clear coat them.”

“Fathom and Centaur are kind of like my dream machines. So I plan to do a similar restoration on Centaur as the Fathoms and kind of go all out on that one. And those two machines will, wherever life takes me, I plan on those coming with me.”