Picked up a few Bally bingo machines over the weekend.
Gotta love a van!
Nothing special. Two Show Times and a Big Time. The price was low but the drive was long. The machines were all water damaged (found that out once I'd driven all the way there) and are pretty much good for parts only. The whole affair was more of an excuse to take a day off work and drive around to be honest.
I noticed the Show Time bingos each had an interesting decal on the top arch:
Bally celebrating its 25th anniversary: 1932 - 1957
A Union stick I have never seen before:
NATIONAL INDEPENDENT UNION COUNCIL
AMUSEMENT & VENDING MACHINE EMPLOYEES
LOCAL UNION No 1
Never saw that before
Also noticed a key difference on the parts Big Time compared to my good Big Time:
My good Big Time bingo machine has a strange setup for the ball trap switches. Actually my machine doesn't have switches. It has contacts and it's the conductive metal ball that completes the circuit to the card number lites. The shutter has NO switches on my good Big Time.
It's a very annoying setup, balls that have orange peel (imperfect surface due to long term play) tend to have poor contact resulting in intermittent and flickering numbers on the card.
A set of contacts 180 degrees across the hole.
The Big Time parts machine has proper switches on the shutter. I speculated that it was a retrofit of some sort: maybe an operator put in a shutter from another machine model due to reliability issues...
But on the underside of the playfield, there is no sign of the contacts. So it's definitely not a retrofit.
Interesting production variations. I'm curious to know which variation is the most common for Big Time.
Which variation do you have on your Bally Big Time Bingo?
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