marsonion wrote:I put together a Firebird (or is it called a Thunderbird-? Who knows?) from a box of loose parts sent to me by my buddy Bruce M. in Indiana. He's dragging his feet on coming over to fetch it, so for now, it's
mine. Anyway, yesterday the thing spontaneously stopped cycling all the way, hanging up just short of releasing the coin slides. It took me some time flicking moving parts around to finally discover what was wrong: a stack of three nickels jammed-up tightly in the tiny space indicated in the pictures. One of the few weaknesses in the design of the QT's is this Columbia-like "Swinging Ramp" contraption to feed the twin jackpots; it's a shallow incline so lazy coins can easily back-up and overflow, dropping into tight places like this and seizing solid against moving parts. These three nickels were pinched in there so tight I had to half-cycle the machine to pluck them out. The cycle returned 100% immediately after clearing those nickels seized by the Swinging Ramp.
I'm not saying that this is necessarily your specific problem, but you might want to get out a flashlight and check very carefully for jammed coins such as this... they can get caught in the most obscure and unlikely places, and can be very difficult to recognize even when they're right in front of my nose.
Nice job putting a QT together from just parts!
All of the books and articles I can recall seeing refer to the machine as the Firebird, though I've also seen Thunderbird used somewhere. I've never seen any Mills literature or advertising for this model, though I think that I have for the model that preceded, it, the short lived Silent Junior ("Indian Head"). The operator instructions printed for it refer to it as the Q.T., and I've seen period references to it as the QT, though I'm not sure if Mills used different specific names when they introduced the later variations that we now know as the Chevron or V-Front, Sweetheart, etc.
I had a similar coin jam after a mishap just the other day. Nickels back up and overflowed the tube, finally jamming the handle after falling into various places.
EDIT/ADD: The Mills of The 30s book, which has a lot of original Mills promotional materials and dates the pieces, has an ad shown as being from 1935 for what we could call the Chevron or V-Front - referring to it as the "Q.T." and "Q.T. Silent," ignoring any distinction between versions. If that date is correct, the Firebird version may only have been in production for around a year.