I've had some good weeks and bad weeks on eBay, some struggles and triumphs, some pride and prejudice, some sense and sensibility... but luckily, no crime and punishment (yet). I started off the eBay season at the beginning of March with my usual collection of pinball stuff and bizarre junk from the 80's that I never threw out. Since I got the populated Centaur playfield,
I decided to sell off the bare playfield and stuff I bought for it. I figured that if the "crazy eyes" Xenon could get over $100 (twice!) I could probably get twice that. What I discovered was what I thought was a good deal at the time turned out to be way more than the market would bear at resale time. I put the playfield up with a $200 reserve and the first time around it got up to just over $100. See, having a certain amount of integrity meant that I wasn't going to post a blurry picture of the front and back like so many eBayers, but rather posted high res pics plus closeups of the flaws... and boy, in retrospect there were a lot of flaws. There was the touchup done on the whip handle, there was wear along the ball launch path, the right cheek of the drain babe's butt, and the captive ball captive's junk. It just was not worth the ~$340 that I paid for it... if only I could have gotten the guy who bid against me and some other clown in a bidding war, it would have been great. Anyway, I couldn't take $100 for it, so I relisted, it went for $150, and after a little thought I sold. I just shipped it off today. As far as the parts went, I was generally disappointed. I paid about $100 for them, and I think I made around $40-50.On the plus side, I disassembled the parts from High Speed and made a killing. Of course the game didn't work when I tested it, and I tried booting the CPU board but it had too much battery damage. As I mentioned, I did find the working alphanumeric display, but everything else had to be sold as untested. Still and all, I cleared $275, with the bulk of that coming from the police light topper ($112.50) and the display ($69). Even the non-working displays sold for $4, and I was brutally honest about the fact that they had been tested and found wanting. The awesome HS sales combined with some unexpected vintage computer ad sales ($108 for an IMSAI catalog? Yeah, baby!) to propel me within spittin' distance of a $500 week, my second best ever (first would be hard to beat, $565 for a copy of the Apple II version of Ultima with all its packaging).
Finally, to balance the bad and the good with a dash of ambivalence, I sold some of the Doctor Who parts I got from Illinois Pinball. The first time I sold them, I got double what I paid for them, then I since that did so well I sold a second batch the next week and barely covered my costs before shipping. So the important lesson I learned is either don't sell stuff immediately OR eBay is a chaotic system that defies logical explanation. I'm not sure which is the more valuable lesson.
And to balance out my sales, I pulled the playfield out of High Speed and put the cabinet up in my first ever Mr. Pinball classified ad! (I've created an amazing simulation of it on the right.) I guess I kind of had dreams that it would draw a bunch of offers so I would have to sort out the "or best" of them, but as it turns out the only one was from a guy from Missoura who said it was exactly what he needed and agreed to pay full price. The only problem? He lives over 900 miles away. The solution? Luckily, unlike me he has actual friends, and one of them who lives only about 200 miles away from him is going to Pinball Wizards, so I will bring up the cabinet on Saturday and give it to his proxy. If you're doing the math, that means I've made $325 on High Speed, which is just north of what I paid for it, which means it, like the Doctor Who parts machine before it, is PROFITABLE!!! And I still have the backglass and playfield glass to sell! Yay for our side!So today my wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary, tomorrow we're going to see a matinée of Iron Man (her choice! yes, I am the envy of men everywhere), and Saturday is the pinball show... we'll discuss all that soon with all the details of the Pinball World Tour. Sheesh!
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