Repair & Maintenance Log
Phase I, October 2004:
Here is the cabinet gutted of all parts, ready for a good cleaning and shining. The upper rail holds the glass in place. The lock was already missing from the cash door when I got the game. I scrubbed down the cabinet with 000 steel wool (being careful of the Pioneer Novelty decal), applied two coats of Minwax Wood Finish (special walnut 224) and one coat of Deft semi-gloss spray lacquer. It's certainly cleaner and shinier, but all the dings and imperfections are still clearly visible. What I really want to do is sand it down and refinish it to perfection. But I'll live with it like this for awhile and see what happens.
The highlight of disassembling the machine was finding this 1937 penny jammed into one of the inside cabinet joints. It was like an archeological find! According to my wife's coin book, it might be worth about $6. The picture above shows the penny ready to take another ride on the coin slide.
These are the parts from the front of the machine. The picture shows them before I did anything. Maybe I'll get then re-chromed someday. For now I just polished them up with more 000 steel wool.
This is the ball lift after I cleaned it. It was one seriously gunked up mess. The housing casting is marked FJ1, the cover casting is marked FJ2 and the lifting cam casting is marked FJ3. Note the horizontal slot in the housing. This is to block the cam when the coin slide is pushed in. More on this feature below.
This is a top view of the coin slide. I neglected to take pictures when I had it apart. This was the most problematic part when I got the machine. It was bound up and hardly moved. It was good and gunked up, but it was also assembled incorrectly. Some of the screws are almost imperceptibly longer than others. They have to go in just the right places. Once I figured that out and got it back together correctly, it worked just fine. It's a fascinating anti-cheating device. I guess a penny was pretty important back in 1932. You can't cheat with anything larger than a penny because it simply wouldn't fit in the slide. The device to the right of the magnet is a spring-loaded finger that tests the center of the penny. You can't cheat with a washer. The magnet holds up anything made of iron. So you can't cheat with anything of iron or steel.
Here's the bottom view. The two spring-loaded fingers test the diameter of the coin. You can't cheat with anything smaller than a penny. I haven't got this part to work yet. I think it's just plain wore out. But perhaps with some careful filing I can get the fingers to smoothly pass a penny again. For now the two fingers are disabled with a small stick of wood. If the penny passes all the "tests", the slide can be pushed all the way in. The penny falls out of the hole on the left and just drops to the bottom of the cabinet. I used the 000 steel wool again to clean it all up and then lubricated it with graphite powder instead of oil.
This picture shows the ball lift and the coin slide all back together and back in the cabinet. Note the spring-loaded lever. When the coin slide is pushed in, the ball lift is blocked from operation. This prevents a person from holding in the coin slide and continually cycling balls through play. Before you play the game, you must insert your penny, push the slide all the way in and let it come all the way back out again. As you can see, the designers were serious about getting that penny!
Now the coin slide is in its return position and the ball lift is free to operate. Also note the coin slide return spring. I ran into a problem here. The diagonal force of the spring was causing the slide to bind up again.
I pulled the parts out of the cabinet again and added a new eye hook directly inline with the motion of the slide. Now the slide returns smoothly.
Next to go back in the cabinet are two blocks of wood. The big block keeps the balls from falling off the ball lift trough. The little block on top is the return stop for the shuttle. I've also installed the ball lift handle and the ball lift return spring. When I got the game the ball lift handle was connected to the ball lift shaft with a friction pin. The pin was hard to get out so I replaced it with a cotter pin. The head of the cotter pin is the anchor point for the return spring. The spring holds the cotter pin such that it didn't even need to be bent. This will be very easy to dissemble again in the future.
Next up is a thin sheet of plywood that catches the balls and returns them to the ball lift. Note the slot that allows the coin slide to push the shuttle.
Here's the bottom side of the shuttle. The bracket fits through the slot mentioned above and engages the end of the coin slide. Note the two return springs at the bottom.
Here's the shuttle back in place. Pushing in the coin slide moves the shuttle forward. The holes in the shuttle line up with the holes in the playfield and the balls drop down to the plywood and roll back to the ball lift. The shuttle was pretty rusty. I buffed it down with my trusty steel wool and sprayed on a coat of clear lacquer. The shuttle rests on wood rails built into the left and right side of the cabinet.
Phase II
Well... There is no Phase II. I started buying modern electronic pins and Five Star was left to collect dust for nine years until I sold it in October 2013. Time for someone else to have fun with it.