New Ball Lift Design by Rockston Engineering !

[rockston]

I am missing something here, how can I fill the top any faster than the rate you are losing balls, isn't that where I am getting them?

[Card Shark]

Remember bonus payouts during a fever will be going to the front payout tray and it can be a lot of balls in a very short amount of time that are be depleted from the top reservoir.

[rockston]

let me ask a dumb question ...Where is the lifter set up and what is feeding it?

[Card Shark]

I have my losing balls going into a lower reservoir. That reservoir then feeds my lifter. I hope that makes sense.

[luckydog]

its setup by the bottom ball tray in back, lost balls are feeding it,

remember you need to play a lot usually before hitting a fever, so.

you should have a good supply there to start with.

[Card Shark]

Here are some photos of my set up, maybe they will help.

Full Rear.jpgLower Rear.jpg

[rockston]

Ok, you are talking about several machines all linked up, I was talking about one machine and one lifter.

In the one machine and one lifter scenario, you can only lift what you can lose.

Sounds like we need either 2 speeds or two different motors depending on what you want to do with this lifter


Scratch this , just saw your pics !

[rockston]

Why didn't you put the extra basin on the top?

[Card Shark]

My set up is just with one machine. There is a pressure switch in the upper reservoir of my machine that lets the lifter no to send more balls. The lower reservoir on mine that is catching losing balls holds enough extra balls that I can make it through a fever and still have enough reserve to keep the upper reservoir fed.

[Card Shark]

Here is a shot of the front of the same machine.

IMG_0605 (600x800).jpg

[Card Shark]

I think that Denhomer may be using one or two lifters with a multi-machine set up. I believe he has a large losing ball reservoir that catches from all machines and then he lifts to a large reservoir that distributes new balls to each machine's upper reservoir.

[rockston]

Ok , I am thinking that if you put the reservoir on the top you simply need to fill it at the rate you are losing at the bottom, (at the speed of your shooter tops) it would always be large enough to handle the fever and would recover afterwards. Now if the game is loose, or you are super lucky, then you are going to have a problem either way right? you will take balls out of the system.

[Card Shark]

Mine is set up with a funnel at the top to pour back in winning balls. So far the set up seems to work well with my modern. I do have a Dave Rob Dongle so I can "buy" balls 25 at a time from the top hopper. I have seen several member's cabinets that have larger top hoppers. Mine turned out this way as I was converting a cabinet I already had to be compatible with a ball lifter I acquired later.

[rockston]

Shark, What you are doing is filling a small upper tray really quickly from a large bottom stash and that's working for you. I think we need to fill a large upper stash at the rate of loss so the bottom is always empty. One is the hare and the other the turtle. they both get to the finish line at the same time, make sense?

[rockston]

In a perfect world you should eventually lose all winnings back to the machine (spoken like a true gambler) then just hit a button to fill your shooter tray again by letting gravity work for you

[rockston]

thanks and Goodnight, I will think about all this

[daverob]

I really like this new cam based design. I was worried that your original piston based design was more complicated and would be relatively expensive to produce, but this is a simple and elegant solution that looks a lot simpler to make.

As far as speed is concerned, the 'only have to keep up with the shooter speed' is fine, as long as you're only lifting the losing balls that drain out of the playfield, and any balls that are won by the player are either played through the machine, or returned directly to the top hopper.

I have my single machine cabinet set up so that the ball lifter is also fed from a second location, a tube running from the 'prize' ball tray on the front of the machine. During a fever when the shooter tray is full, I can press the front tray drain button and feed balls back (via the lifter) into the top hopper. In this situation, I would ideally need a ball lifter that can keep up with the speed of the fever payouts, so the faster the better (even the orange Japanese lifters can't keep up with back-to-back 'kakuhen' fevers).

This front tray drain tube has a ball count sensor in it, so (once I find the time to re-write the interrupt routines on the dongles software) I'll be able to keep track of the 'winnings' that are returned to the ball lifter and add them back as credit to the dongle. While this isn't really the right thread for discussing this modification, I suspect that it may be quite popular, and so there should be an option of a faster ball lifter even for single machines.


I've also noticed from your videos that I've only seen you running the lifters with a minimal number of balls in the box that feeds the lifter piston/gear. Have you tried it with the box filled to the brim with balls? The number of balls in the box makes a huge difference to the likelihood of ball jams, especially when you get to the stage when balls are stacking on top of each other.

[Card Shark]

Another thing I was thinking about last night. With a large upper reservoir, my pressure plate switch would not tell the lifter to bring more balls until the upper hopper was low. It would then tell the lifter not to bring more balls when that hopper was "full". However "full" to this switch due to where it is placed would only be when the hopper was full not the larger upper reservoir. So once you went through the balls in the extra large upper reservoir, it would only be adding enough balls to keep the original upper hopper full. I am sure this could be corrected by a different placement of the pressure plate switch.


I do love DaveRob's idea of the tube to add winning balls back to the lower reservoir. I may need to may this addition to my machine.

[rockston]

thanks guys, is the orange lifter running on 110v and sending out low voltage switching or switching the 110 itself?

Shark, Instead of a pressure switch on top, I was thinking of a simple small hinged flap mounted to the upper side of the prize reservoir with a normally closed micro switch that rides up with the level of balls.

Dave, you are right, I'll be working on the last problem next to address hopper jamming issues when its full, the good news is that the drive mechanism does not

jam at all so that's solid and done.

It looks like a motor that delivered 250 bps at 12 volts and around 500 at 24 volts could be doable and make most people happy. A motor speed dial would be

nice but possibly costly, I wonder if I can find a surplus speed control off of a cordless drill motor, that would be sweet !

thanks

[Card Shark]

I believe the orange lifter is sending out low voltage to the switch. I can check on this though tonight when I get home.