Zen and the Art of Slot Machine Maintenance

This was our dad's slot machine. Terry Smith kept a Mills Bursting Cherry, and it came to Dan with the estate. Dan kept it running for years, until one day it jammed. It went into storage and sat there for seventeen years. Then the two of us pulled it out and, between us, got it paying again.

This book is the wisdom we've picked up along the way, written down so the machine keeps going when it's handed to the next generation — and so that if it ever needs a real mechanical wizard, they don't start from zero either.

What's in it: how the machine thinks, a baseline of what "healthy" looks and sounds like, a reference sheet for when it isn't, and a fill-in-the-blanks protocol for the photos, videos and notes that turn the generic parts of this book into a record of this exact machine. Way down the road, an inventory of every part and spring, so a failure is an order, not a mystery.

Corrections and contributions: open an issue on GitHub. If you own a Mills and something here is wrong for yours, tell us which section and what you saw.