My Custom Home Arcade – Coin Mechs

In the beginning, I was setting each game to be freeplay, but I sooned realized that not every game was accessible in this fashion. This was particularly true with the older games. So the other day, I was on eBay and noticed a seller with some tokens listed. I was able to score 1000 for about $60 after shipping and tax. This beats the $0.24 per token that Suzo/Happ charges!

Anyway, I got the tokens yesterday and followed a tutorial I found on another blog, but I still couldn’t get the tokes to drop properly. I had to make the standard adjustments and then one of my own. Here’s what I added:

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If you look at the hole to the left, you’ll see that I added a brass tab in there. I was able to rip out two brass connectors from an old microswitch, bend it slightly in the shape of an ‘L’ and then super glue it into that spot. What this fixed was a problem where the token (slightly lighter in weight than a quarter) was rolling off the coin cradle at the wrong angle and sliding too far into the mech, which caused the coin to be rejected. The only true way to solve this problem without having to buy token-only mechs is to get a heavier coin/token.

Well, for one, I didn’t want to spend any more money on this and two, I wanted to be able to accept quarters without having to undo any mods. So, what my brass tab does, is it actually bounces the coin down the acceptence slot rather than letting it get jammed into the back corner. The only downside I can think of this is that now these mechs will probably accept any coin similar to a quarter in size. Oh well…I’m not running an arcade or anything.