Until you are certain that a bend is causing you problems, you should probably leave it alone. Bending was a common and accepted adjustment in most antique slot machines. If you encounter parts that are bent inside of an antique slot machine, your first instinct may be to straighten them out immediately. You may also notice in the above photo that some of the fingers are bent a bit on the right-hand side.

Parts wear together over the decades, and changing them around can sometimes cause you problems. Here’s a view from underneath the base plate:Īll of the fingers look the same, except for the very top one which has the hook for the spring that I destroyed earlier in the teardown (the jackpot finger), and the bottom one which has a protrusion on the front edge (the one-cherry finger.) Even though the middle four fingers are essentially identical, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep them in the same order when you reassemble the machine. For this reason, if you have a machine that won’t pay off at all you should probably spend a bit of time checking to be sure that the lever travels freely and that the attached spring returns it to its proper position. If the small spring attached to the safety slide lever breaks or loses tension, or if the lever gets generally gummed up, the safety slide can travel backwards on every pull of the handle, preventing the machine from paying off. Although these are relatively minor parts, they sometimes cause problems. The entire safety slide/lever mechanism is sometimes called the “non-beating” mechanism for obvious reasons.

If the machine has been jarred during its cycle, however, the lever trips and the slide moves backwards to prevent coins from passing through. It its normal position, it allows coins to pass down through it and out of the mechanism into the payout chute. When we remove the payout slides you will be able to see the safety slide itself, which is really nothing more than a thin piece of metal with a hole in it. The safety slide lever assembly is the closest thing an antique slot machine has to a pinball machine’s “tilt” mechanism. It’s secured by a shoulder screw visible in the photo above, plus a spring that is attached to the underside of the base plate. I chose to remove it now, so that’s what the photos reflect.

The part in the photo above can be removed at this point, although it is probably easier to wait until the coin slides are removed.

Mills slot machine restoration