Silver Orange Pachinko Ball Lifter Setup

I bought a Silver Orange ball lifter from Yahoo Japan Auction.

I've been waiting a very long time to find a really clean example. These ball lifters have always been relatively expensive and they usually look like they spent some time at the bottom of the ocean. So when I saw this one come up for sale I had to get it and bid accordingly.

Super Clean!

I foolishly thought this would be plug and play, but it rarely is with stuff from YJA. Despite what the auction listing said.

The unit had no low ball level switch, no elevator start prize hopper paddle switch and the wiring was a bit "unconventional ".

No big deal, I can make this work.

I looked trough my stash of micro-switches and found one that would do for the low ball level switch. Even found some JIS screws for it.

 

Then I fabri-cobbled a prize hopper start switch from junk I had around. It's more of a proof of concept really. It just clips to the side of the hopper. Eventually I will make a switch paddle that sits at the bottom of the hopper. But for now this will do. It works-ish.

It's a case of " 60% of the time it works every time "

With the switches done I setup the elevator on the back of the Heiwa, directly on the floor as a kind of test mule. I played the game a bit and quickly found out that the lifter's hopper ball capacity was pretty low and that balls ended up on the floor by way of the overflow, rolling everywhere. So to make the setup functional at all, I had to make some kind of platform to set the game and elevator on with enough room to have a box to catch from the overflow.

I didn't want this to turn into some kind of life ruining project. I wanted to be able to swap games easily. I didn't want to go out for building supplies, so I had to work with what I had at home. AND I'm not a woodworker. I had to work with what tools I had on hand.

This is what I came up with. Some scrap 2x4 lumber, plywood from an old bingo machine backdoor and some old shelving brackets. It even has levelers. For tools I used a circular saw, a miter saw, a jig saw, a hole saw and a a drill. It took longer to build than one can imagine, I had to do a lot of measuring to make it as straight and square as possible with my limited resources. For some reason I had "Some Kind of Stranger" by The Sisters Of Mercy playing in a loop while I built the platform.

It does the job. It's not perfect, but it works.

Playing impressions using a ball elevator:

It's a bit of a zero sum game. True, I can play longer, I don't have to manually refill the prize hopper, the elevator does that for me. BUT as I win more balls, eventually I have to add balls to the lifter hopper. The won balls need to be replaced, sometimes faster than I can play them. So it's not some kind of magical device that allows you to play forever. It's not a closed system.

In my opinion, In the current setup, this kind of elevator is more like a cool artifact from the old pachinko industry days. A collector piece: more form than function. I like it nonetheless.

🎵 And I know the world is cold, but
If you hold on tight to what you find
You might not mind too much 🎵