Jay guessed it, it's a slot machine, or as we call them here, a poker machine (pokie!), but Pants and I call it the Bandit.
It's an Aristocrat machine, we believe from the 60s or 70s (the bottom screen is from the 70s, certainly, but it doesn't match the top screen, which is probably a bit older).
We bought it in a fairly sub-par condition. The lights worked, but that's about it. The arm would pull down a little, but not completely, the coinslot rejected and it's a big huge mass of cogs and whirring things in there.
The good thing is that this is a eary machine, before they were electronic, which means that anything wrong with it is purely mechanical, and purely mechanical is what my baby is good at (he is a real mechanical thinker, I'm really numerically-minded with a high logical problem solving ability, we make a fantastic team).
See the circle hole in the pic above? That's part of the coin mechanism. There are two tubes, one that goes straight to that hole and one that goes off to the side and drops coins into the bank underneath. We've taken off the first tube for this photo, the second is missing, so we'll construct another out of a peice of rectangular aluminium tubing or conduit.
The stickers are lifting, but in decent condition, the coin slot appears to be bent and won't allow coins into it. The keys are lost (thankfully, it's all open), all of the chrome is a mess and all of the grease in the mechanisms is hard and slowing the workings down. It has bits of fluff and coins strewn through it and it needs a good cleaning.
We think it wants to work, though. It just needs some love and encouragement. Pants' da is pretty excited about it, as a project, as are we, and he's already started polishing the chrome, just to see how it will clean up.
Blogger is making my photos look a bit crap. grrr.
No comments:
Post a Comment