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I have a Jennings Sun Chief quarter slot that pays out usually 1 coin short of the proper payout for the 3 oranges and plums. The cherries seem to be ok. Any help would be appreciated.

What about the other pay outs , they short also ???
if so then you might have a British used machine. been a lot of them up for sale lately & most of the sellers won't mention it, = won't sell. few up on eban now.
pay out slides are of a different thickness due to the size difference of those coins.
jeff H.

Thank you for the response. You may be right about that, it usually pays ok for the 1 and 2 cherries, but everything else is off by one coin. That would explain it. Thank you.

When these machines were new, Quarters were made out of Silver. Modern Quarters are Clad and are Slightly Thicker. Once you get into the Larger Payouts of Oranges, Plums, and Bells on a 25 cent Sun Chief all the Payouts will be Short by One Coin. If you want your machine to Pay Correctly you will need to use Silver Coins.

That makes more sense, I kind of suspected that from the beginning. I removed the coin tube and physically deposited the proper amount of quarters for the largest payout, (18), and when manually pushing the slides back, it always rejected the top coin, and I could see that the last coin was just slightly too high to enter the payout. I can live with the shortage of one quarter on those payouts, but if there is any cure for this I would like to hear about it. Thank you for your response.

Silver quarters....start saving $$$$
I have the same issue with Canadian coins....but can live with it.

I would shim the 4 post that hold the coin slides.Maybe 40 or 60 or 80 thousands of an inch. I use small washers and you might have to trim the sides of the washers to fit.

Rich

Shimming sounds like a good option, at least worth a try. I may do that another day, right now, I'm ok with the one quarter shortage. It normally only hits on either 1 or 2 cherry payouts which are correct.

Shimming is not all ways the answer, it doesn't change the thickness of the side.

just one short input. ken

I suspect the general shorting of higher payouts when using contemporary coinage in these old machines is more typical than exceptional. For my dime machines, wherever there is a range of payout on the award card, the payout will invariably be on the bottom end of the range for oranges and often short one dime below range on the plums and higher; as you would expect, a stack of mercury dimes is always a smidge shorter than any stack of the same number of FDRs minted after 1965, and the difference naturally adds up more and more the higher the number of coins in the stack. Today I found that my Mills Dice consistently pays out only 15 of the 16 quarters due on an Eleven win; unless someone can convince me otherwise, I attribute this to a similar difference in thickness between the honest "junk-silver" quarters of the 1930s and the composite/clad 25c pieces in circulation today.