Bally 873 - Payout problem [Resolved]

[essmeier]

AFAIK, my 14 pay wire is good; I seem to have good continuity all the way to the plug.  I pulled all three wiper arms off of the reel unit the other night and cleaned all of the contacts and the wipers and made sure they're all making good contact.  I've reassembled it and everything pays correctly ....except the plums.

My copy of the Bally slot book showed up today; I'm going to spend some time with it to get more familiar with how the machine works before trying to tackle this problem any further.  I simply can't find anything that's amiss, but clearly something's not right.

Charlie

[OldReno]

Did you ever try your plums relay as I suggested?

[essmeier]

Did you ever try your plums relay as I suggested?

I'm not aware of one; if there's a plums relay anywhere in that machine, I haven't yet found it. 

Charlie

[OldReno]

Reply #7
Reply #12

[essmeier]

Reply #7
Reply #12

From reply #7:

Look and see if there are any relays mounted on the right hand side of the 3rd reel wiper.

There are three of them.  They are labeled:

Bar relay
Bar relay
Bar relay

I haven't found a plum relay anywhere in the machine.

Charlie

[OldReno]

Does anything happen when you push down on any of these relays when you have a plums pay on the machine???
It won't hurt to try stuff, you know...at worst you'll blow a fuse.
Have you tried plum pays on all 5 lines???

[essmeier]

I haven't tried all of that yet; just haven't had the time.  According to the schematic in the Geddes book, there IS a plum relay and it's part of the hopper mechanism.  I haven't seen anything like that there, but I'll check into it.  I've only got one or two relays in the entire machine that aren't labeled, but nothing with a label has the word "plum" on it.

It might be the weekend before I can devote any serious time to this, but if anything interesting happens in the meantime, I'll let you know.

Charlie

[OldReno]

Charlie,
I just found an 873 schematic, and it does show plum relays.  Quite an interesting paper, about 6+ feet long, but not nearly as long as a Continental schema. 
Your plum relay has a 41 wire going to it.
What a fun, this thing is one of the more complex reel board Assemblies.
It would be fun to explore this together, but we will need some good photos of the relays and coils.
Cool.

[essmeier]

Success!  Well, mostly.

I found the plum relay.  It's unlabeled and mounted on the floor of the hopper unit, directly below the hopper itself.  It's really hard to remove even if you move the pay board out of the way.  There was one switch on that relay that was somewhat bent out of position.

When I put the thing back together, I lined up three plums and it didn't pay.  I then opened the door, stuck my finger in there and manually engaged the relay and it paid out.  Since then, it's been paying out consistently for three plums in any arrangement.

Not sure if it's completely fixed, but the plum relay was obviously the location of the problem.  Time and repeated play will tell the tale.  My only remaining problem is an intermittent "winner paid" light, but the circuitry for that is fairly simple so I think it shouldn't be too much trouble to fix.

Thanks to all for the help with this.

Charlie

[JanGbg]

Great! :-)