Harbor Freight Pinball Lift Modification

Buying and selling pinball machines gets more complicated when you factor in how to move them.  After collecting machines over the last few years, I found myself with 10 machines packed into my house.  This summer my wife and I moved and getting the machines to the new house seemed like a daunting task.  It was time to invest in a pinball lift!

There is a great thread on Pinside documenting the many different ways to modify the Harbor Freight hydraulic lift tableinto a suitable pinball lift.  The primary issue with the lift table is that the handle that extends up from the cart does not allow the table to slide under the table far enough to be centered under the machine.  As a result, many people have modified the handle in one way or another to allow the cart to slide to the center of the machine and lift it safely.

Before settling on my modification, I tried a few that others suggested.

1. Hinge Mod – place door hinges on the cart and attach the handle so that it can swing up and down.

This mod would have worked well, except for the release cable even after being re-routed was a little too short to fully extend the handle after it was attached. I considered just getting a longer cable from a local bike shop, but the hinges were already showing signs of bending so I decided to attempt the pipe-fitting mod.

2. Pipe-fitting mod – place new 45 degree pipe fittings into the holes where the handle should go and then place the handle into the pipe fitting.

After purchasing all of the suggested parts from Lowes and took them home to discover that the threaded ¾ nipple would not fit into the handle receiver on the cart. With some force, i was able to force-thread one of the nipples into the opening though it wasn’t a secure fit. Once I attached the handle it easily came loose on one side. I suppose I could have messed around with this some more and found different pipe sizes to make this work, but I decided to try something different:

I made a trip to my local bike shop an picked up:

1. A new brake release cable

2. A kid’s bike brake lever

I affixed the brake lever to the pump handle receiver and attached the new cable to the hydraulic release under the cart. The brake cable’s length was about 12 inches.

Moving around the pinballs after getting them up in the air was easy and I used the machine itself to move it around instead of a handle. There was no worry of the machine coming off of the platform as long as I got it close to centered under the machine

I was able to move 8 machines out of my old house load the all up into a 16 foot box truck and get them into my new house. Hope this helps someone out there!