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Found a couple more pics of the Air Ball...

Greetings, Nate Thompson here curator of www.buckwerx.com

I just joined Penny Machines to add to the "Rare Machine in Australia" forum posts.

I bought Hal O'Rourke's (tiny) Rockola parts business from his widow Susan O'Rourke after his passing. With it I picked up the Pleasure Island game, at the time I didn't know how rare it was. Hal refinished several Rockola machines by stripping the original lead paint off the game, then repairing, staining and applying a lacquer paint. I've come across a Jigsaw and World's Series he had done in that manner. Cabinet refinishing and repainting is nearly essential. Nearly every unrestored Rockola game I come across these days has broken glue joints in the cabinet and can't be restored without extensive repairing, nailing, glueing and refinishing.

I believe Hal bought it from someone in the US, but it is also possible he brought it back from Australia through his military career travels.

I still have the game, but have had to do quite a bit of tuning. But it runs pretty well, and has truly unique with ball gates associated with the World's Series "Balls" and "Strikes" channels. At one point I thought that there was one more in the US, but I no longer know where it is.

In regards to Army Navy, I agree with Gameswat that it is very complicated as compared to Army Navy or Jigsaw. I've tracked every known Army Navy that I've come across for the last 10 years, and so far only 24 exist. The last one become aware of was in England, and sold to a collector in Texas. It was originally a gold-top, but the gold had been repainted to silver. Mike Hasanov is currently restoring for it's owner. If any forum members know of machines outside of the US, please send me a note (nathant at spectralogic dot com)--I am keeping a list of how many exist. Perhaps that is called "game spotting".

-Nate

Nate,

Welcome to the site by the way, very informative info to this machine, I am sure appreciated by all,

Cheers

TF

I've just heard from my friend in Queensland regarding the Billiardette machine. He tells me that all it says on the machine is "Billiardettes" and McNeil's patent. So it doesn't look as though it could be French but could be British, American or Australian. Mr Pennymachines states that he has always assumed it to be an Australian machine, but I've gone through all the relevant Australian patents and, I haven't come across anything like this machine. It's rather difficult at present for me to search British patents by the name of the inventor so perhaps someone in the UK could search for "McNeil's patent".

I saw that machine recently

I have searched all English patients from 1880 to 1920 and found nothing, maybe it was not patented or done under a different name ?

I too have searched for this and have drawn a blank so far.

Thanks to Sweetmeats and Bryans Fan for their efforts. And I have now managed to search Australian patents back to Federation in Australia (1901) without success for a coin op machine by McNeil??? US seems unlikely but who knows?

I've found some much better photos that I had of the Magic Ball machine so here they are.