From Rusted to Renewed

By Rick Polito, IJ reporter

UP TO HIS elbows in wires, gears, tiny electric motors and dusty plastic castle ramparts, Mark Manley is pulling the stake from Dracula's heart.

But this Dracula takes quarters.

"I think the problem with the paddles is in the circuit board,"Manley says, leaning over a pinball machine with the undead count glaring coolly from the painted glass backdrop.

Manley, a trained automotive mechanic, is spending less time crawling under cars these days and more time rooting his way through the clockwork bowels of old Coke machines, dust-encrusted Wurlitzer jukeboxes, rusty metal pedal cars and ailing pinball games like the Dracula model he performed surgery on last month. It's part of a business Manley's boss believes will resurrect showrooms' worth of nostalgic mechanical icons now rusting on multitudes of Marin back porches.

"This county is rich with stuffed garages and stuffed back rooms,"says budding nostalgia merchant Don Orlandi.

Old penny gum-ball machines, neon signs, heavy steel ice boxes. Orlandi, owner of Orlandi Fender and Body in San Rafael, wants to take the expertise and equipment he's accumulated in restoring old cars - his company built the hot rods for "American Graffiti" - and put it to work restoring the icons of his youth.

He keeps one of those icons in his home. It's the soda machine from which he used to yank a cold glass bottle of Coca Cola when he clambered off the school bus every day while growing up in Sonoma.

"I used to put a dime in the same Coke machine I have at my house," Orlandi says.

The natural progression of accumulation became Past Perfect, an offshoot of his auto-body business that restores the old machines, kids' pedal cars and whatever rusting hulk of nostalgia he can pluck from yard sales, auctions and the universe of eBay.

Which is why Manley isn't spending as much time under cars anymore.

The 34-year-old grew up in Marin and found his Zen for things mechanical as a boy working on motorcycles and whatever gizmos he could find around the house. After studying automotive repair at Indian Valley College, he worked his way through San Rafael's Canal Area auto repair district, landing in Orlandi's shop eight years ago.

He wasn't sure he could fix old jukeboxes until Orlandi asked him.

The old, rusted coke machines didn't look encouraging, either.

"You look at some things and think, 'No way. Throw it in the garbage,'" Manley says.

But machines are machines, and parts can be replaced, even on 60-year-old soda machines. The average pinball machine may have 2,000 parts and 100 tiny light bulbs, but Manley can tinker them back together. It is a rare talent. He calls it simply "the basics of taking things apart and putting them back together."

"Once you understand the system, it's fun," he says.

There have been shocks on the learning curve, frayed wires lending him the occasional jolt. And the mechanical jukeboxes can be especially picky.

"If you don't have everything right, it will shoot records at you. I mean it will hock records at you," Manley says.

Every machine holds a new lesson. The older jukeboxes have paper and wax capacitors that must all be replaced. In the pinball machines, every rubber bumper has to be taken out and every short circuit traced through a bird's nest of copper wires.

But, as Orlandi says, the pieces are "understandable." The solid steel gears of a 1949 Coke machine are very tangible and real in a way that computer chips and buttons can never be. Sometimes he and Manley will pull open some creaking machine and just stare at it until they figure it out.

"We brainstorm it," Orlandi says.

The problems they can't brainstorm away, they take to the master.

At least once or twice a month, Manley makes a pilgrimage of sorts to Roseville and the shop of Rick Murillo, the retired Hewlett Packard tech who now restores old pinball machines and jukeboxes. Manley works week-long stints as an apprentice in Murillo's Rock Around the Clock shop.

"He'll hand me an amp and say, 'Rebuild this. I'll come back and check on you,'" Manley says.

Much of the work is similar to the basics of the Orlandi family business - auto body repair. There are the paint booths and sandblasting equipment.

The hulking metal cabinets housing the old soda machines come in rusty and leave gleaming. Restoration is restoration.

And Orlandi thinks he can make some money at it.

"It's profitable if you have a body shop," he says.

Indeed, the high-end collectible contraptions come with big price tags. The restored jukeboxes sell for $6,000. Metal pedal cars from the 1950s can fetch $600 when Orlandi's crew is done with them.

Past Perfect will also take in pieces from people who want to bring life back to a machine they already own. Orlandi and Manley have the equipment and are picking up more skills with every new machine they resurrect.

"One of the things that keeps people from doing it themselves is, 'where do you start?'" Orlandi says. "People don't know where to go, and they buy things they don't know how to fix."

Orlandi is convinced there is a market for nostalgia -fixing it, maintaining it, living it. He envisions a whole new business with a shiny showroom in Novato, complete with restored vintage cars and a Foster's Freeze ice cream machine. "Everybody takes a piece of growing up with them through life," Orlandi says. "When you drink a Coke from a tiny glass bottle, it takes you back."

For Manley, it's not so much nostalgia as challenge.

The flippers on the Dracula pinball machine are not flipping, but they will. The big blue Pepsi machine three feet away is an empty shell, but it will soon be clanking ice cold bottles. Machines are machines.

Some are more fun than others, Manley says, standing over the disemboweled Dracula machine.

"This is fun," he says, "because you get to play with it when you're done."

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