Coin mech question

demogo

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OK, a couple of questions, actually.

I've never messed with coin mechs before tonight but my left coin mech has been acting up on my Spy Hunter for a while. Sometimes it records the quarter drop, sometimes not. Right coin mech always works perfectly.

Anyway, I have exactly one plastic Happ new coin mech that I've never bothered to put in so tonight I stared at the coin mechs until I figured out how to get them out. (Incredibly simple when you figure it out).

So I pop the troublesome left coin mech out and put the Happ in and it goes in smoothly. BUT -- the quarter jams right as it is leaving the metal chute on the coin door and going into the Happ mech. It *never* did that with the old mech. There were some adjusting screws of some sort on the Happ mech but when I loosened the one at the top or the other ones it didn't seem to make any difference.

I popped the old mech back in and the quarter drops smoothly through it.

Question 1 -- what's going on here? Why would the quarter suddenly jam when I swapped in the Happ mech? It looked like it was in correctly and if I pulled the Happ mech out and dropped a quarter into it, it went through smoothly.

OK, so I get annoyed and put the old mech back in and notice that it may not actually be the mech at all that's screwing up as the trigger mechanism that registers the coin drop seems to be attached to the coin door itself rather than the mech. So I push on the metal bracket with the trigger mechanism and bend it in until the coin jams there, then bend it back out again and now the coin drops seem to be registering 100% of the time.

Question 2 -- I guess the metal bracket for the trigger mechanism sometimes just gets bent and doesn't properly register the coin drop anymore? Does this make sense? It wasn't the coin mech after all? Thoughts?

Thanks!
 
Yup - chances are it was just the switch, or the tiny wire on the switch. Unless the mech is jamming or sending all the quarters to the return slot, its fine. Thats all it does it reject slugs/washers/bad stuff. Once it accept it, it drops it on the switch which does the registering.
 
As for the mech that the quarter gets stuck in, sometimes it does that with the new quarters but not the old quarters.

Also, it's possible your plastic mech is a token mech and not a quarter mech...
 
OK, that makes sense.

Coin mech wasn't jamming, sounds like the metal piece around the switch might have been bent. I dropped about 15 quarters through it, both with the door open and closed and all register fine now that I've bent it a bit.

Any idea of why the quarters would jam when entering the happ coin mech?
 
As for the mech that the quarter gets stuck in, sometimes it does that with the new quarters but not the old quarters.

Also, it's possible your plastic mech is a token mech and not a quarter mech...

Wow -- neither one sounds like a good issue to have because there's no working past them. If it were a token mech would the quarters drop right through it correctly when it was out of the door?
 
Wow -- neither one sounds like a good issue to have because there's no working past them.

Sure there is. If the new quarters get stuck but the old ones don't, you can often fix that by polishing up the metal block plate inside the quarter path. Often, older quarters are smoothed out from use while the newer ones aren't, so they catch a bit going thru.

Token mechs can be modified to accept quarters, although I believe once you do it, it can't be changed back to tokens.

If it were a token mech would the quarters drop right through it correctly when it was out of the door?

No. If they drop thru fine out then they should drop thru fine in. If they don't, then you need to mess with the alignment better....
 
Sure there is. If the new quarters get stuck but the old ones don't, you can often fix that by polishing up the metal block plate inside the quarter path. Often, older quarters are smoothed out from use while the newer ones aren't, so they catch a bit going thru.

Token mechs can be modified to accept quarters, although I believe once you do it, it can't be changed back to tokens.



No. If they drop thru fine out then they should drop thru fine in. If they don't, then you need to mess with the alignment better....

Well, I guess it's a moot point because I've got the old mech and switch working okay, at least for the moment.

I don't see that there's really any alignment options with the Happ mech install. Guess I won't mess with it again unless it acts up again.
 
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