. . . so last night I began tearing into my newly acquired halfer. It plays smoothly and pays correctly but
boy does it need a good cleaning and some fresh grease! It did come with a matching numbers Mills lock and key! The bonnet and back door appear to have a bronze color, as well as the reel and escalator windows (Jeff-there is a minimal amount of overspray on the inside of the casting around the windows ). The coinbox is complete although a bit worse for the wear. There is one sticker on the base of the mech but, sadly, it is so covered with grease it is unreadable.
I'm still not sure what I have here. Perhaps it began life as a Chrome Bell (Diamond front), but these machines (and their successors) paid on a single cherry. This slot pays only on double cherries. So I'm thinking this one has an older mech , and the award bib was cribbed from another machine as well to match the payouts. Curiously, the bib has a lock cylinder drilled into it, but it appears to serve no useful function. There's a foto of the award bib above.
Without any definitive clue as to what this baby
was, I'm not sure what I would restore it to. But she's a keeper, so perhaps I'll stamp a bit of my own personality!
A few fotos:
- "bronze" bonnet
- Mills key and lock (No. B5730)
- 'older' mechanism?