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I recently started working on an antique mechanical Jennings Sweepstakes Chief 5c slot machine. I watched Dave's videos on youtube for how to unjam the machine (super helpful!). However, the machine continues to jam about half-way through a lever pull and I always have to unjam the machine. I cleared the escalator and checked to see if there's nickels anywhere and the problem continues to occur. I've noticed two things:

1. It looks like a spring is missing. But I'm not sure how important it was. The bracket that should hold tension on two springs has the left tooth broken off:



2. The escalator is very difficult to manually advance and I'm wondering if the problem is the escalator isn't advancing with the pull of the lever.



Here's a picture of the lever half-pulled and jammed:



I would really appreciate it if anyone could point me in the right direction!

With regard to the spring issue, definitely YES, you need to replace it. I had exactly the same problem when I got my Club Chief. It took a little while to get hold of a proper replacement for the broken part (sorry, I can't find the catalog part#), so in the meantime I got it running by grinding a functional replica spring retainer out of a big washer... not exactly proud of this, but at least it worked.