Pinball wizard

TOWN OF MANLIUS – Once the outbreak of COVID-19 was declared a pandemic in 2020, Tim Ruymen’s career on Long Island as a video editor for weddings and corporate events came to a sudden stop.
With nothing to shoot, he was drawn back to an avid interest in pinball that began when he was a teenager frequenting arcades and the occasional pizzeria in the 1990s.
To get by on a steady-enough income, keep busy and have some fun during quarantine, Ruymen decided on a whim to purchase his first-ever household pinball machine and learn how to repair it for his sake and for others who possess their own. To do so, he relied on YouTube channels, Facebook pages and online forums devoted to lending helpful tips and schematics for solving just about every pinball-related problem known to man.
“All pinball people wanna help pinball people,” Ruymen said. “It’s just a niche and they wanna help you fix things and get them working.”
From there, he made friends within the game’s larger community, bought and sold several more machines, and connected with arcade owners able to spread the word about his services.
After he moved to Manlius with his family this past July, Ruymen started cleaning and refurbishing machines for Skill Shot Arcade on East Molloy Road while building up a social media presence using the moniker Timball Wizard—a reference to The Who’s 1969 hit “Pinball Wizard.”
Though he doesn’t play by sense of smell like the character in that song, Ruymen enjoys his ability to help people through his side hobby and the friendly competition that comes with pushing toward high scores in his favorite game.
“When you’re slinging around that steel ball and controlling it to get high scores, you can’t really replicate that on a digital format,” he said. “It’s like a fun little world under glass.”
Ruymen’s repairs to malfunctioning pinball machines have involved assignments like unloosening balls stuck in the playfield, switching out chips on central processing unit (CPU) cards, and changing light bulbs underneath rollover targets. He said it brings him gratification to figure out the right approach for each unique machine, comparing the trial-and-error process to a puzzle.
“Every one has its own theme and design,” he said. “I think they’re kinda like works of art.”
When Ruymen isn’t putting his creative eye to use for his day job filming and editing footage of organized events, he’s using it to revamp a nostalgia-sparking, early 1970s machine with a Monte Carlo theme or ones that, for example, have Secret Service or space-inspired designs.
Like a friendly neighborhood bicycle repairer, he has no set prices for his work restoring pinball machines, instead basing the amount to throw in on the length of time and difficulty that goes into completing a job.
Ruymen can be contacted through his Timball Wizard Facebook page, and his teasers for projects that come through are posted regularly on TikTok.