Overflow pushbar, check detector arm and coin advance lever

The next three parts are a snap to remove. First, the overflow pushbar.

Secured by a single cotter pin, this part pushes coins off the top of the payout tube once the tube is full. The excess coins are then routed to the jackpot assembly and ultimately the cash box if the jackpot is full.

Let's take a quick look at the slot machine mechanism... it's really starting to look bare.

Now we need to turn the mechanism around and work on the other side for a while. First, let's remove the check detector operating arm assembly.

If you look carefully at the photo above you can see how this operating arm engages the anti-check payout control parts we looked at earlier. If the check detector arm is allowed to move forward by the escalator because of a check being played (there's a special pin to sense the hole in the middle of a check) then the arm trips the anti-check payout control lever, allowing the anti-check payout hook to drop. This, of course, would hold the vertical payout pushback lever in place, restricting the movement of the vertical fingers and disallowing any payouts of coins as we discussed in the previous chapter. It's a neat system, when it works.

The check detector operating arm assembly is secured by a single cotter pin, with an attached spring near the top of the arm.

Now we're going to remove the coin advance bar operating lever, which is easy to pick out in the photo below.

This part interacts with the escalator at the beginning and end of the mech's cycle, releasing and resetting the coin advance bar locking lever which allows/restricts the advance of coins across the escalator. It's secured by a couple of cotter pins and a spring, so those need to be removed.

Let's take another look at the mechanism before we proceed. We've made a lot of good progress.

Vertical payout fingers and related parts

Now it's time to remove the long-named "vertical payout pushback lever assembly" which is a complicated name for a relatively simple part.

The name of this part tells you pretty much exactly what it does, specifically pushing the vertical fingers back away from the payout discs at the beginning of the cycle. It's attached to the machine with a screw-in shaft, seen above just below our old friend, the anti-check hook. Now that the parts are uncovered, you should be able to see exactly how this troublesome part works. If you look at the portion of the pushback lever assembly that looks like a roller, you can see several places where it looks like something has "grooved" the roller. These spots are where the vertical fingers have worn the roller as it has pushed them back, time after time. If you look at the end of the roller, though, you see something that looks like a rounded nub. If you rotate the pushback lever assembly so that it pushes back on the fingers, you will find that the anti-check hook will slip right over that nub, holding the roller (and consequentially the fingers) in place. Since the fingers can't travel forward to check for a payoff condition, the machine will never pay off.

We'll remove that part later.

Back to the pushback lever assembly, it's a pretty simple thing to remove but some caution is in order. The slot in the threaded shaft is very small, and you need a screwdriver that will fit all the way in the slot before you attempt to unscrew it. This shaft and the next one we will tackle have a tendency to stick, and if you aren't careful you can break them fairly easily. I'd recommend that you not use an electric screwdriver for any slot machine disassembly tasks, but that goes double for these shafts. If the shaft gives you trouble, you may want to use some sort of penetrating oil to loosen it up, or in a pinch you can actually grab the center of the shaft with a pair of vise-grips and turn it a quarter-turn at a time to loosen it up if necessary.

Anyway, carefully unscrew the shaft and remove the pushback lever assembly.

It's not a bad idea to replace the shaft after you've removed the part, but you might want to hold off for just a few minutes since it can get in the way when we remove the vertical payout fingers. I didn't take that advice, and it caused me to miss something important. More on that in a minute.

The process for removing the vertical fingers starts at the top.

Before we go any further, remove the springs from the top of the fingers and store them in your spring jar. I'm planning to replace a good many of these anyway, but you never know when you are going to need an extra spring. (That's called foreshadowing for those of you who failed Freshman English.)

The removal of the vertical payout fingers is a little involved. They are secured by a screw-in shaft like the part we just removed, although this shaft sometimes also has a lock nut on the back of it. Check for that before trying to unscrew the shaft. The same cautions apply for this shaft... it's easy to damage.

Anyway, once you have the shaft removed, the payout fingers can be lifted out almost straight up, except for one thing.

Yup, while I was worrying about getting the fingers around that first shaft that I'd already replaced, I didn't notice that there was a spring attached at the bottom of the front finger. This spring isn't always present, and I just plain forgot about it. As you can see, I pretty much destroyed the spring.

Luckily this isn't a big deal, and I probably have a spare, but I'm still irked at myself for missing it.

Enough with the spilled milk, though... let's take a closer look at the vertical fingers.

Take a look at the photo of the fingers out of the machine above and notice that I've threaded some wire through them to keep them in the same order they were in on the machine. This is another good habit to cultivate. If you happen to forget, however, the order is generally easy to determine if you look at the bottom of the fingers.

If you look at the notches above (not counting the saw-tooth stuff on the far left... that's just for hooking the problematic spring) you can see that the notches get smaller as you go left towards the front of the machine. The actual "working" part of the vertical fingers is the spot just below those notches. Notice that it gets bigger as you travel to the left. This part of the fingers strikes the horizontal levers, which in turn release the payout slides. The more slides that are released, the bigger the payoff.

The fingers above correspond to the symbols for bars, melons, bells, plums, oranges and cherries respectively. If you look at the two far-left fingers, you can see that there is no notch at all, meaning that when activated these fingers hit ALL six of the horizontal levers, causing ALL six of the coin slides to travel backwards and drop their contents, including the very top slide which also trips the jackpot mechanism.If you total up the coins in all six slides, you end up with 20 quarters although this varies from machine to machine.

The finger for bells triggers five slides for 18 coins, the plum finger triggers four slides for 14 coins, the orange finger triggers three slides for 10 coins... but then we come to the cherries finger, which has two different possible payoffs.

The cherries finger is a special case, and can actually have two different states based upon how far it travels. If it moves just a little bit, as it does when there is a single cherry on the first reel but no cherry on the second reel, only the very bottom horizontal lever is triggered for a payout of 2 coins. The bottom horizontal lever has a special extension (which we will see later) for this exact purpose. When the finger finds a cherry on both the first and second reels, though, it travels far enough that it trips both the first and second horizontal levers, giving us a payout of 5 coins.

Based upon the above, we can also figure out how many coins each payout slide holds based upon the payoffs of the machine. From top to bottom, here are the coin capacities of the six payout slides:

2 -- three bars or melons
4 -- three bells
4 -- three plums
5 -- three orange
3 -- two cherries
2 -- one cherry

Pick any winning combination above, then add up the coins listed to the left of it plus all coins listed below it and you should end up with the correct payout totals, not counting the jackpot of course.

If this doesn't make sense to you now, don't worry about it too much. We'll be taking a closer look at both the horizontal fingers and the payout slides later. The important thing to remember is that if you don't keep the vertical fingers and payout slides in the proper order your machine will pay the wrong number of coins for winning combinations.

For now, let's remove the vertical finger guide assembly.

We've just got a couple of screws to remove, and then the guide should be hanging by a spring.

You'll have to detach one end of the spring, but it doesn't really matter which one. Here's the finger guide by itself after removal, along with more errant grey paint.

We could have just as easily removed the finger guide before removing the fingers themselves, and that might well have been easier. When completely disassembling a mechanism, the order of parts removed just isn't that critical.

That was some of the more complicate disassembly that we've done so far. Next time we'll tackle a few easy things.

Removing the clock, payout slide lock lever and kicker

The next part we're going to remove is a small linkage lever that runs between the clock and the reel stop timing lever.

The lever is held on with two cotter pins, so no big deal to get it off the mech.

Next we're going after the reel timing lever itself.

The reel timing lever is the part responsible for slowly allowing each reel stop lever to come in contact with its related star wheel, stopping the reels in a 1-2-3 order as the clock unwinds. It's secured by a cotter pin and an attached extension screw.

The extension spring must also be removed at this time because it attaches to two ears and isn't locked into a hole, so if we don't remove it now we might lose it. More such springs are on the way, so we need to be sure that we have a box or jar in which to store all the stray springs.

Now, we move on to the clock assembly itself.

Earlier we referred to the main operating fork as the "spine" of the slot machine mechanism. If the operating fork is the spine, the clock assembly is the heart. If the clock stops, the machine stops.

Removal of the clock is accomplished by removing four screws that secure it to the base plate. Please note that these screws are located directly on the base plate. You don't want to unscrew the wrong screws here and have the clock come apart. On this particular mech, the front two screws (right in the above photo) don't even need to be removed since they are in slots rather than holes. Loosening these two screws and removing the two in the back of the mech should allow the clock to slide free.

The clock mechanism is pretty dirty, and we may well have to disassemble it and clean each part individually, but I'm hoping that a dip in some solvent and a re-oiling may be sufficient. Time will tell, I suppose.

Next, we're going to remove the payout slide lock lever. It's secured with a single cotter pin.

This lever holds the payout slides in place until all the reels have been stopped, the payout fingers have been released and the horizontal payout levers have been tripped (if applicable). This lever being activated essentially marks the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of the mech's cycle.

Now it's time to remove the kicker assembly. It may have been hard to locate in earlier photos, but you shouldn't have any trouble now.

The kicker is attached by a single cotter pin and a long extension spring, so it's easy to remove. Before we do that, take a look at the photo above. That long extension spring provides the direct power that spins the reels by pulling the kicker as it presses against the underside of the payout discs, kicking them into rotation. The second spring that is integral to the assembly pulls the top portion of the assembly out of the way after it kicks the reels, allowing them to spin without running into the kicker itself.

As you will recall, one of the initial problems I had with this machine was that the reels weren't spinning. The problem that caused that condition was that the top part of the kicker was gummed up with a bunch of hardened grease, oil and dirt. Since the top part didn't want to rotate, after the reel discs started spinning they were running into the kicker, which was stopping them again and causing the machine to make a "Clang!" sound as the reel disks were struck like a gong. It's a common problem, and nothing that a good thorough cleaning won't fix.

Here's the kicker out of the mech:

Onward and upward... next time we'll tackle the payout fingers and some of the related parts.

Removing the timing lever, main operating fork and A-frame

The next part of our antique slot machine restoration is the removal of the timing lever, pictured below.

The timing lever's job is to trigger the vertical payout fingers so that they travel forward and detect any winning combinations on the reels at the end of the mech's cycle. It's held in place by a cotter pin and a spring that is attached to a lever on the clock assembly. Removal is pretty much self-explanatory.

Next up (or more appropriately off) is the timing lever link assembly. Take a look:

The timing lever link assembly provides an interface between the timing lever (that we just removed) and the clock assembly. On later Mills machines (like this one) there is an adjustment screw that allows you to vary the timing of the payout fingers' release. Optimally, the fingers will release halfway between the stop of the third reel and the point at which the payout slides are released. Anyway, to remove the timing lever link assembly, remove the cotter pin under the adjustment screw on the left of the part, then swing the part out to get to the other cotter pin pictured below.

I'd recommend leaving the adjustment screw in place for now, particularly if your machine was in generally working condition when you started disassembly.

There's one last part we're going to remove before taking out the main operating fork, and it's a little hard to see. It's a small bracket on the back of the timing lever bracket and stud assembly. It is secured with two screws, as seen in the photo below.

Remove those two screws and the bracket will drop and you'll have to fish it out of the mech. It looks like this once removed (with the screws replaced, of course):

With that part out of the way, we are free to remove the main operating fork, which is somewhat like the spine of the slot machine. When the machine is cycled, virtually every part of the operating mechanism depends upon the main operating fork. Removal of the fork should be pretty easy now that we've removed so many parts. The fork is secured by four screws as shown in the two photos below.

Each pair of these screws secures a removable portion of the main operating fork bearings. It's important to note that these bearings should be replaced exactly as they were removed, meaning that you should keep the right one on the right and the left one on the left. You should also keep them aligned the same top-to-bottom, so be sure to keep them straight and replace them immediately after you remove the main operating fork assembly. Here's what the fork assembly looks like after removal:

As before when we removed the rear bracket, we're not going to attempt further disassembly of the main operating fork assembly at this time. We'll tackle that later during cleaning. By the way, notice the grey paint on the spring above. That's a sure sign of someone taking bad shortcuts.

The mechanism certainly looks different now... let's take a look.

The A-frame pictured above should come off easily now just by unscrewing the two screws that attach it to the base plate, but there's a small part that I'm going to remove first.

This part is called the felt pad bracket and assembly, but it sure doesn't look like there's any felt on this one. Removing it is a snap, just undo the two screws securing it to the A-frame, then remove the A-frame itself from the base plate.

Before we move on, let's take another look at what's left of the mechanism.

It definitely looks different. Here's a closeup of the clock mechanism:

If you've never taken a machine completely apart before, take some time now and play with the different parts you see. Take note of how they operate and it will greatly enhance your understanding of how a mechanical slot machine operates.