In the photo above you can see that someone has used strips of paper/cardboard as shims to separate the three pieces of glass from the reel windows, and this is pretty typical. Honestly, that’s probably a better approach, but since I removed the frames at this point that’s what I photographed. Some people prefer to leave the frames in place, remove the top casting and then deal with the frames with the casting resting flat. Often you will need to replace the glass anyway, but there’s no point in being careless. Now, removal of the frames identified above is pretty simple, but you do need to be careful with the glass when you remove the frames or else the glass will fall and break, giving you another item to replace. With the escalator removed, we can now get to a couple of pieces of glass on the front casting. They really aren’t that tough to get working correctly, but some people are lazy. You occasionally see some strange things when looking at escalators.

Outside of the case, the escalator looks like this: You might want to save the middle screw for last, just to keep the escalator from swinging out of place while you are removing the screws. It’s held in place by three screws denoted by arrows in the photo above. We’ll be disassembling it later, but right now we just want to remove it from the top front casting. The escalator is essentially the part of the slot machine that accepts coins, makes sure that they are the correct denomination, rejects slugs and determines if the player is using checks. We’re going to start by removing the escalator, which is really simple.

In any event, we need to disassemble all of the parts related to the case and cabinet. Generally the terms “case” and “cabinet” and interchangeable, although the wood sides and base are the actual cabinet, while the entire assembly of wood sides, base and front castings are often considered to be the case. Compared to the work we’ve already done disassembling the slot machine mechanism, the tear-down of the case and cabinet is a snap.

Mills mystery front slot machine