When I was in my late teens, I spent much of one summer saving up for a Star Trek: The Next Generation pinball machine. The guys who unloaded the freight truck were bemused to find a 17-year-old kid signing the delivery slip. One of them said, “When I was your age, I was saving to buy a car!” Well, I already had a car, and also I was a humongous nerd.

I thought it would be fun to have the machine because it was a blast to play and a great collector’s item. Then, a week after it arrived, the machine stopped spitting out balls, making play somewhat difficult. I called the place where I bought the pin, and they dispatched a service guy. He replaced a fuse in the backboard and charged me $40. “Hell, I could’ve done that myself,” I said to the repairman, just a few minutes after he left.

The upshot was my discovery that maintaining a pinball machine is the real joy of owning one. I tapped into a vibrant online pinball community and learned how to fix a weak flipper or a broken optical switch. My dad noted that the machine was, as it turned out, a lot like the good old-fashioned American teenager’s first car, given that I spent so much time under the hood tweaking the machine like a beloved hot-rod. Of course, there are differences. For one, it’s tougher to pick up dames with a Star Trek pinball machine.

A pinball owner is always fighting the fact that these machines were not designed for long-term use. The inner workings were made as reliable as possible to a point, but the manufacturers wanted bars and arcades to trade the tables in for new models, which was unlikely to happen if the old rig was still collecting quarters. The factories also had to keep costs down, which meant that Williams, Gottlieb, et al., often used cheaper, less durable components than their engineers might have liked.

Over a decade of ownership, the problems with my ST:TNG mounted to the point where they couldn’t be ignored. The machine would, for example, turn off and reboot itself if you happened to hit both flippers at the same time (a common problem on mid-1990s Williams machines). So this summer, I decided to give it a complete overhaul. The machine is still at my family’s New Hampshire home—lack of square footage puts a damper on so many pinball collectors’ dreams—so for about one weekend a month I headed up to solder, sand, replace, rewire, etc.

After all this, I put everything back together, and I was reminded why the D.I.Y. movement embodied by publications like Make and Instructables is so exciting. After working with your own hands on a complicated project, nothing beats the thrill of that Frankenstein moment when you flip the switch and awaken the beast. “Holy crap, it works!”

I highly recommend pinball as a project for the technically inclined if you have the time, space, and money. (It doesn’t have to be a wallet-busting hobby, but it’s not cheap, either.) Pinball maintenance hones a broad-based skill set. It combines mechanical and electronic tinkering, and there’s a bit of art to boot—most pinball tables have amazingly detailed visuals. Here’s a set of bookmarks to get you started, and expect more pinball coverage on Geek Out New York in the near future.

Step 1: Find a machine. The Mr. Pinball classifieds are a good place to start your search, along with Craigslist. As you browse the offerings, cross-check them on the Internet Pinball Database to get an idea of what the machine looks like. Most classified listings have only fuzzy pictures, if any. Pinball machines are hard to photograph. The IPDB is also a fun way to browse for games you might like to track down for your collection.

In New York, pinball dealer Crazy Levi has a great reputation, but he only sells fully restored machines, which in my view takes away half the fun. (If you just want a machine to play rather than fix up, though, Levi’s your man.)

Step 2: Fix it up. I often reference the bogglingly thorough technical information (for machines of all eras) at pinrepair.com. The guys behind pinrepair.com have also made a series of videos called This Old Pinball that are not just educational but also pleasingly goofy and weird. Even though the production values aren’t Lucasfilm-esque, as the trailer for TOP #7 below shows, they offer a huge amount of information in between the gags. Video may be mildly NSFW, especially if your boss hates pinball.

Step 3: Play it. If you’re not nudging the machine when you play (i.e., “Body English”), you’re a novice. If you always hit both flippers at the same time, you’re a sucker. The IPDB’s primer on pinball skills will probably surprise most pinball beginners with the range and depth of playing techniques you can use to conquer a game. Here’s a textbook demonstration of one such technique, the difficult but handy bangback:

My favorite part of the bangback video is that the player appears to be wearing padding on his hand for the sole purpose of executing this maneuver.

Now defunct, the old Pinball Pasture site had a more extensive range of tutorials, and luckily the Internet Archive preserved a copy.