Rapestoration

[terick2104]

Is this jackpot management part unique to the 'Caille Grand Prize'? The reason I ask is, the few Caille Superiors that I have owned didn't have it.

[nvmos2]

Along with terick2104's question about the "snail,"
I'm wondering if the Caille Grand Prize is even considered part of their Superior line.

The few places I've seen the GP in the literature, it's never referred to as the "Superior Grand Prize."
As far as the machine that started this thread is concerned,
I suspect that the "artist" who did the rapestoration improperly placed a reproduction Superior Bell decal on the side of it just because he had an extra decal.

[watlingboy]

Here's an example of part of the problem, there's a guy on Ebay now, take a look, selling a restored Watling Bird of Paradise. He describes the reel strips as "Flawless." There is a huge scratch running through the 3rd reel where the reel stop lever has rubbed it and removed all of the color. There are honest sellers and dishonest sellers. Unless the buyer can spot the difference, he doesn't know.

Watlingboy

[flipper77]

Agree! Saw that same eBay posting and very misleading description. Seller comments "I cannot see that it has ever been restored (oh sure - duh!) but I will leave that to Watling experts." Then looking closer the same seller has a second Rol-A-Top on eBay - this one even more questionable. Nickel Rol-A-Top with penny gum vendor? Same comment about "cannot tell if ever restored - - - (Oh sure!). And then the capper - "I do not have much info on this series of Watlings because it is the first I have ever laid hands on." But the seller has second Rol-A-Top for sale? The prices are so high that these won't sell unless someone is really taken in with the misleading description.

[marsonion]

These are good questions I can't answer. For terick2104, all I can point to are pictures I've collected; wherever a front-view of a GP mech is offered, the "snail" is there, but for our eBay friend here, there is just a pair of screw-holes in the bottom casting and the recessed drive bar where it clearly oughta be. And golly, nvmos2, I've always thought of a GP as a member of the Superior family, but like you, can't find any ads or lit where Caille calls it explicitly a "Superior Grand Prize." HOWEVER all the original reel strips on GPs have "Superior" bars on them.

BTW any of you old-time experts out there ever seen even a picture of these Caille slot models from 1933? Bueschel lists them, and I'm really curious what they looked like, positioned as they are between the Silent Sphinx and Dictator. I have a hard time drawing a stylistic line between those two models, for sure:

Caille Gold Star (First Produced 1933)
Caille New Deal (First Produced 1933)

Along with terick2104's question about the "snail,"
I'm wondering if the Caille Grand Prize is even considered part of their Superior line.

The few places I've seen the GP in the literature, it's never referred to as the "Superior Grand Prize."
As far as the machine that started this thread is concerned,
I suspect that the "artist" who did the rapestoration improperly placed a reproduction Superior Bell decal on the side of it just because he had an extra decal.

[watlingboy]

The Grand Prize is just a Superior Jackpot with a 4th reel. Superiors never had pumps, that I've ever seen, always a clock. Except for a couple of odd ball versions that had hand load jackpots, slits in the jackpot where you would hand load the coins, the jack pot had to refill automatically. So some kind of mechanism had to be on the mech to do this. No operator is going to expect the owner of the bar to pull out the mech and refill the jackpot. Yes, something should be there.

Watlingboy

[marsonion]

No, of course Superiors never had any hydraulic "pump" timers-- those were first installed on the Silent Sphinxes in 1932-- though that may be news to our ebay GP seller friend here. In fact, the Superiors which featured jackpots did have a very simple automatic feed as I described earlier: each CCB and CCL (i.e. each four coin payout) was accompanied by the actuation of a device, made of only two moving parts engaged by the second vertical finger, which merely opened up the bottom of the escalator to allow a nickel to drop out and land in the jackpot. Thus, the JP will fill eventually in any Superior given enough play. This arrangement is in place whether there is a "snail" in the works or not-- the "snail" is there to drop a buck's worth of player's money into the JP ASAP (five buck's worth if it's a quarter machine) so the JP won't sit there looking empty too long after a jackpot. Whether this particular device appears in any models other than the Grand Prize (where it is standard equipment) I am not certain.

The extra reel on the Grand Prize does not pay out mechanically and is just sort of dragged-along by the first reel. It does, however, engage a little counting device through a slot in its hub whenever the 1-2-3-4 lineup of symbols shows up on the payout line; the reel trigger (believe it or not) actuates a probe to the reel hub which pushes this little ratcheted counter-ticker along. Presumably this was put in there to check and validate the over-the-counter "Grand Prize" payouts, which, I have heard, were not a terribly popular idea with the operators.