I picked up a fairly nicely restored Bowl a Strike earlier in the year, and after finally getting some time to give it a decent play, I've discovered a few things that may (or may not!) need tweaking. Just as part of the back story, I believe this was originally from Italy if this has anything to do with it.

First up, it seems that at some stage in the past 50 years an extra digit reel has crept in to the 1's position. As you can see in the photos below there are 5 reels, where there was originally meant to be 4. The 1's digit doesn't have a stepper attached, so it just sits on 0, making all the scores effectively multiplied by ten. One theory I have as to why this has come about is that there may have been significant backglass damage that has been covered up by the additional paint to make it 5 digits, and a 5 digit score reel bracket was installed? Another theory is that the operator wanted 5 digits to make it look a little more modern?

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In this picture you can see where the wood has been cut out for the reels. The cuts seem old (not like fresh cut wood), so I'm not sure if this is an indication of the age of the modification?

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In this photo you can see the additional "1's" reel, what you can't quite see is that there is a spring in the reel, but none of the other stepper or coil parts.

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Wherever it came from, I now have the scores written on the playfield not matching the actual scores, which irks my OCD a little Options I can think of to fix are:

1. Swap the static "1's" reel for the "10,000's" so that the scoring is correct, but scores over 10,000 won't roll over to that digit properly
2. Do option 1 AND track down a stepper (and a relay?) to attach to the 10,000's reel to actually make it roll over properly and have proper 5 digit scoring
3. Suck it up and just keep the scoring 10 times what it should!

Second question I have is that the adjustment labels are either worn or missing in the backbox, is anyone able to get a photo of these from their game for me?

Thirdly, where is the chime meant to be located in this game? I can find the two bells, but the chime either is missing or hidden somewhere I haven't discovered. I assume that the replay version of this - "Lucky Strike" would have the same bell and chime layout?

Thanks for reading, hopefully I can get his old game back close to its former glory!

Hmm, the second bell I have is located in the back left of the cabinet, mounted on the back wall of the cabinet. I should get an equivalent photo to match that IPDB one to show the differences...

http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=363&picno=27291&zoom=1

Thanks for the detective work @darcy, here's a pic of the whole backbox, looks like that chime has gone missing!

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Yep, the knocker is now in the front right of the cabinet!

If I can't track down a chime unit from this era, would another era or manufacturer's unit be compatible?

Also interested to hear opinions on the idea of getting the extra score reel functional. Not knowing too much about EM's, I'm not sure if that's crazy idea, or one that just involves adding an extra relay and a stepper unit?

Wow, there is a lot a lot of examples there on ipdb! Thanks for that, it is an interesting part of history! I thought mine was just a unique hack, but seems it's a lot more widespread.

Latest update - I tracked down a chime unit from Crow River Trading! http://www.crowriver.com/clock/clockparts.htm

This arrived a couple of months ago, but it's taken me some time to get around to installing it. The wire to run the chime was sitting wrapped around some other wires nearby, and I ran the ground wire from the nearby relay. I also had to move the relay from a horizontal to a vertical orientation, but it all seemed to fit. Now it's all up and running with both bells and a chime, sounds great

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