This is the Defender coin door I got from Jeff at Central Vending. That Jeff guy was an alright fellow. He reminded me a lot of Nolan Ryan, and I kept expecting him to pitch a no hitter. He really let this stuff go for a good price. Barry, the guy at the Red Lion who used to own an arcade business, said I should be able to pick it up for no more than $20.00. I felt bad about such an offer, and did not want to insult Jeff. After all, he had taken out some of his own time to show me the remnants of his once-great collection. I offered $30.00 dollars for the door, and $5.00 for the Pole Position II marquee.
That's it. It's better than I had anticipated after talking to him on the phone. When he told me it was going to be from a Defender machine, I immediately pictured in my mind, the original, silver, pinball-style coin door. But this one is black. So I checked my cabinet pictures, and sure enough, they did make Defender with a black coin door.
As you can see, one of the coin mechs is missing. But I still know of that guy in Pasco who has an old machin in his backyard. His coin door is all messed up, but the mechs are good.
Check out how many quarters were dropped into this thing! Arcades were the wisest choice a businessman could have made in the 80's. And selling arcades and buying starbucks stock was the wisest choice a businessman could have made in the 90's.
Here is what the coin door looks like when it is installed in the ZOOM MACHINE.
I decided that it would be cool if my coin door accepted any kind of coin. So instead of getting a new mech for the right coin slot, I decided I would jerry rig something instead. If you look at the picture below, you can see that I took some cardboard (off a cereal box) and made a little chute using some scotch tape. Now the coins go straight down to the switch, no matter what denomonation they are. So now I have a quarter slot on the left, and an any coin slot on the right.
For the wiring, I just unhooked all the original wires and daisy chained the two switches up to an empty slot in my keyboard encoder. Pretty neat, pretty neat. Pretty good, pretty good.
And what coin door would be authentic if the lights in the coin reject buttons didn't work? Kate's dad took an old cell phone charger that put out 4.5 volts and wired it to a couple light bulbs that we stuck in the holes. They aren't in the picture above, but I mean, I think I worded that well enough so that you can catch the drift.