Old cabinet gone

Well it took 2 weeks, but someone finally contacted me to take my old cabinet.  Guy from Milwaukee picked it up.  He plans on making a simple early solid state game (no graphics, just scoring).  His ideal theme is Kraken (assuming that's pirates?).  He's got PROC hardware already and is going to use mission pinball framework.  He's good mechanically, but sucks at programming (like me) but apparently has a friend that's going to take care of that part for him.  He even stipulated "If this cabinet doesn't work out, you ok with me passing it on?" and I'm like "Oh yea of course, I get it.  I'm on my 3rd cabinet now.. I get how projects can change.  I hope you do pass it on so someone else can start a project".

Do pinball enthusiasts even want to start building their own pinball machine?

I did a little cleaning in my basement (we had some purging, plus I wanted it to be clean because someone was buying one of my pins).  Now that I have my modern cabinet there's no reason to keep my old F14 cabinet (it's just taking up space).  So I first threw it out to my local pinball club members (about 10 people).  FREE FREE FREE, a cabinet with all the hardware you would need for a cabinet for either homebrew or a virtual cab (easily worth a few hundred dollars with used parts), no takers.  Ok no problem, I'll stick it in the Chicago sale pinside thread, easily 100+ eyeballs, surely this will go fast.  Lots of thumbs up for my post, not a single message of someone that wanted it (and I posted that like 2 weeks ago).

Now, if I had perhaps included a flipping whitewood (48v/12v power supply hooked up directly to some flippers with an end of stroke switch) I'd be willing to bet this would be a different story.  Even if they never code it, I'm guessing if you were offering a flipping machine someone might find it fun to start throwing some stock playfield parts, maybe even building some cardboard ramps.  So perhaps it's not the cabinet that stops people in their tracks when it comes to starting a homebrew, it's also that they find the electrical portion daunting and don't want to commit to a project.

So I'm at a crossroads.  I don't want to just throw a perfectly good cabinet away, yet I don't want it to take up space if it has no purpose.  Part of me wants to turn it into an interactive homebrew thing I bring to pinball shows.  Have a flipping whitewood running off of a power supply with basic outside walls, then provide a bunch of stock parts and let people play around with it.  My only reservation is you can't exactly have the public drilling holes (and turning a whitewood into swiss-cheese), and I don't know if a hot glue gun is safe enough for the public to be messing with.  I wonder if I could have some sort of metal top half playfield and each component could have a neodymium magnet on the bottom.  That way it's stationary enough to handle a ball knock, but is still moveable.