anti-cheat. People would take out a leg bolt and with a coat hanger try to get free games by messing with coin units. If I do any cab work on a game I usually discard these...

Talk about cat and mouse games! Seems that they had to build a lot of 'better mousetraps' over time.

I see a bunch of kids with coat hangers lined up in front of your house!

Back in the 1960's or 1970's, as kid or teen, I certainly would not even think of sticking a metal object into any that had electricity in it. The risk of getting a life threating shock would have been ingrained on us kids.

That's why we used plastic drinking straws to get free games on Donkey Kong BITD.

POTW. Never would have guessed that in 100 years.

I was going to guess that. First, I considered it's not doing anything with the bolts, as they are on the outside. Then, the way it is fastened it is definitely not for strengthening support. Just blocking those leg bolt receivers. Then I realized you said toward the front and said nothing about the back. BINGO...coin box is in the front! Still, it doesn't seem to be very easy to maneuver a coat hanger around and get that sweet spot...though I guess thieves are sometimes very patient.

I remember that

Those who survived used rubber gloves.

Mainly used in Gottlieb pinball machines.

I was out in Vegas back in the '80s, and I remember seeing kids in the lobby of one casino getting free games on the videogames by scuffing their shoes on the carpet to build up a static charge, then touching the cash box door. It seemed to work.

Before the use of a grounding braid?

Hahah! I love that reasoning- anti cheat! Awesome. I remember trying to super glue quarters to a string and working the coin mech to try to get free games in the arcade when I was a kid. I just wish I could remember if it worked!! I think it probably did a few times but dont recall endless free games! Dang- We would never have imagined pulling legs off a game. We may have been criminals but we were small time!

Did that
(got caught though)

also why the side rails on older games go down so far
on wood rails you could drill a small hole in the side , push a wire though and activate the switches

No one ever questioned why you were drilling into the side of the machine ???? lol

Sounds like a good reason to receive cheater's justice.

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We did this on this on the old six card dime machines. There were many that were painted this ugly two-toned yellowish and pink and those were just the ones we wanted. We'd take one of the old hand held drills, have someone stand in front blocking, drill hole(s) in pink painted area then use a coat hanger to activate the switch and lite the number. Never activated more than one to two numbers at one time as it was hard to do but, hey, 5 numbers in row in the yellow back then would pay 20 bucks which I don't have to say was a lot of money for a kid back in the late 60's and early 70's. We always drilled in the pink paint because it was damn near an exact match in color to Bazooka bubblegum which is what we would plug the hole with on the cab. Seemed like it took the operators of the time a couple weeks to figure out what the hell was going on and by then we had moved on. Best places were bars as they were dark and not many took notice to what we were doing.

Of course, you find many plexiglass backglasses with a hole either neatly drilled or burned through directly on the replay window. This was another way to cheat the game by either stopping or ratcheting up the credit wheel.

Many woodrails have a metal strip on the inside edge of the cabinets to thwart this effort.

We used to lift the front of a Sky a jump and set it on our steel toe boots. Then with playfield almost flat, the ball would stick in a roll over and you would just jiggle it an the points racked up. We would get so many free games that we started unplugging the machine and putting an out of order sign on it so people wouldn't use all our fee games while we were gone. I'm not sure anyone ever really figured out what we were doing. Good times!

Funny you say that, Topcard. We used to do something similar with a "Top Card" machine at the college pub.

We used to do the same thing with matchbooks under the front legs! We also talked about using a super strong magnet to control the ball but never did that. Wonder if that would work?

too much gap between ball and glass. You get a strong enough magnet to pick the ball up to the glass and then its too high to hit rollovers/targets

I've successfully captured a pinball with a magnet through the playfield glass. The trick is, you need a very strong magnet, and you can only do it on a game with a kickout hole or holes. When the ball drops into the hole, be ready with the magnet, and place it over the area where the ball will be kicked toward. Apparently it's airborne just enough to allow the magnet to grab it. Magnetic force increases or decreases exponentially in proportion to the distance, so that small reduction in distance while the ball is slightly airborne greatly increases it's attraction to the magnet; enough so that you can snag the ball. A magnet won't work on any bingo machines, because they use non-manetic, high carbon balls.