By Todd Russell
Since our family purchased three new pinball machines in 2024 and we’ve played literally thousands of games on them so far, we’re starting to amass a collection of used pinballs.
Next thoughts were: what to do with all these used balls pictured above? Can they be re-used somehow? Is there any scrap value if you recycle? Do you turn them into art pieces?
The following thread on Pinside offered some potentially useful information: Ball recycling? | All Pinball | Pinside.com and in particular the following comment from pinballaddicted (good name, btw!):
I was quickly able to source the Lyman Pro 1200 Tumbler mentioned with cartridges from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Lyman-Cleaning-Tumbler-Corncob-Media/dp/B00D7YU3K8/ – $89.01 USD as of this writing.
As for the Autosol metal polish mentioned? That’s also available on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Autosol-Metal-Polish-Pack-75ml/dp/B0CSDN31SX at $33.99 USD for 6 tubes.
The instructions indicated you can do up to 2lbs of tumbling at one time in this Lyman Tumbler Pro 1200. How many pinballs weigh 2 lbs? Each pinball weighs 80 grams. So converting grams to pounds that means roughly 11 pinballs (880 grams) will be a little less than 2 pounds, with 12 pinballs (two sets) weighing slightly more as pictured below.
For those wondering, a set of six pinballs at 80 grams x 6 = 480 grams or …
So, the next time you’re locked in some crazy six-ball multiball session, you’ve got over a pound of steel bouncing around inside that game.
I haven’t pulled the trigger on purchasing any of this equipment yet for a couple primary reasons:
- cost prohibitive – the cost of purchasing the tumbling equipment and injection material, the time and energy tumbling the balls seems to counter the financial benefit of tumbling and re-using the balls
- am not sure the tumbled balls will be nearly as good as new, untumbled balls
I may still buy this equipment and experiment with tumbling these used balls and see if/how they can be re-used. How many times can they be re-tumbled? What sort of savings would there be? In the meantime, I leave this study to readers that may or may not have already tried this for what you learned from your experience tumbling balls. The comments await.