operator hacks: slot machine mod

I'm fascinated by all the way devious operators tried to make their machines more profitable.

With EM machines the mods can be smaller and less intrusive, but here is an example of a purely mechanical hack.  Taken from a facebook group about slot machines, this hack is much more intrusive.

Someone has taken one of the pay wheels for the slot machine and spot-welded one of the gaps, closing it off.

Each of the 3 reels on a mechanical slot is attached to one of these plates, and the holes line up to the symbols you see on the spinning reel.  If the holes line up, the pay fingers can enter them and that permits the related payout.

With the hole closed, that position on the reel no longer pays out.  The operator then modified the correlating symbol on the reel, changing it from a lemon to a "Bell-Fruit-Gum" icon.

If this symbol comes up, you've lost!

Any gambling machine with a microprocessor controls the odds that way, and is of no interest to me.  But it's always cool to see how nefarious operators might have tilter the odds further in their favour on these older gambling machines.

This hack would have required disassembling the full machine and remove the reel parts to do the weld.