craigbell63 wrote:I've had my previously non-functioning Columbia for 4 days now and figured out how to fix everything but the coin jamming. Maybe I can help. Maybe not. When mine jams with the handle pulled partially down, it always turns out to be coins jammed up in the escalator. I remove the coins and twist the escalator 2 or 3 steps clockwise and the machine will usually finish the cycle, unjaming itself.
Now if only I can figure out how to keep coins from jamming up the escalator... I do hope to find the answer in these forums because it looks like a design flaw to me. If I can fix that, I'm going to have a real nice machine.
One very common problem with the Columbia rotary escalator that isn't addressed in any repair/maintenance article that I've seen: it's supposed to travel 45 degrees of rotation on each pull, but sometimes it doesn't. If you look under the escalator turret, you'll find a spring-loaded conical "wart" that's supposed to "click" into a hole on the underside, securing its precise position every 45 degrees. In many cases, the damn rotating turret thing pulls up short and doesn't "click" into position, so the entire cycle jams. You seem to be saying your problem is with coins jamming in the escalator; are you sure the escalator isn't jamming all by itself, in the manner I describe here? I see you write that you can get the escalator working past one of these jams temporarily by pushing the turret around by hand; that sounds exactly like the problem I'm writing about here. There is a way of shimming the mechanism to remediate this problem; another poster says you just have to straighten the "rails" inside the escalator, because they can impede the rotary action if they rub or bind inside the housing.
