I recently bought a Happy Hospital machine. The dope who sold it to me didn't clear balls out of the machine before shipping it. So it arrived with balls still in the machine and more lose balls rolling around inside the shipping box.

I fired it up when it arrived and was upset to see that it wasn't working properly. I had two problems: 1) The balls that fed out of the top bin jammed in the machine and didn't pay out properly; and 2) the balls that went into the center jackpot hole backed up as well. I thought I had two separate jams. I thought I'd just bought a broken piece of junk.

I e-mailed someone who owned the same model. They told me to log on here to get info. I did that and found a posting that said it was safe to turn the machine upside down and rock it back and forth to clear jammed balls. I did that, cleared what turned out to be a jam in the chute leading from the top bin, and that appears to have fixed both problems.

My interpretation of the problem and how it was solved: Apparently this machine releases the payout balls by releasing the jackpot balls one at a time. Each time one of the jackpot balls is released, 5 or 10 of the payout balls are counted out. But since the payout chute was jammed, the machine interpreted that to mean that the top bin was empty. So it started holding back the jackpot balls, waiting for me to refill the top bin, so that it could pay out the balls I'd won. So that first jam caused what seemed to be a second jam by causing the jackpot balls to backup inside the machine.

Moral(s) of the story: 1) don't ship machines with their balls still in them. 2) don't write your machine off as broken, and don't send it back to the seller, until you've really done your homework and tried to solve the problem.