Repairs and upgrades at Wildhorse

[equusmaximus]

One of the most important upgrades at the bowling alley was to replace the worn-out pins and bands on the lanes.  This, our customers told us, was more important that resurfacing the lanes, or anything else.  So over the last two weeks, we've replaced the pin-sets on five of the six lanes.  The sixth lane remains out-of-order, as I have yet

Comments

[altivo]

I'm impressed that you're doing your own maintenance on pinsetters. They have to be wild and woolly devices, no? I've never been a bowler at all, but others in my family were. I can remember when the alley they went to in Melvindale, MI converted from live pin boys to AMF setters, and we got to tour behind the scenes and see the pinsetters in action. I rate them as the most Rube Goldbergish device I've ever seen.

[equusmaximus]

They're certainly an interesting machine to see in action; Lots of wheels and springs (and strings!) At the same time, they're really very simple machines, much moreso than the stringless machines that are more robotic than anything. I think that was the entire point beind these (Schmid) pin-setters; they followed the KISS rule.

As for wild and wooly - yes, as a matter of fact they can be! The strings are fairly heavy-duty woven nylon, but they do start to fray after a while, and the result is a very fuzzy string. Eventually, the string needs to be replaced, but thankfully we haven't had to do that yet. What all of the machines need now is a really thorough cleaning. Unfortunately, I think they'll have to settle for a lube-job for now, and I'll deal with the cleaning when I can get to it. I'm not even entirely sure how to clean them; Compressed air, perhaps?

[altivo]

Surely there's some official maintenance information available somewhere. How old are the machines?

Compressed air, or possibly a vacuum cleaner with appropriate fittings would seem safe for most things unless grease is a problem.

Pins themselves require replacement at regular intervals, don't they? I seem to recall that they lose their resilience and don't bounce properly when hit by a ball.

[equusmaximus]

These particular machines were installed in 1984, and according to what I've heard, they were used then, so we're talking about some pretty old machinery. The nice thing is, the machines are so basic that they could probably keep running for a Hundred Years so long as they were maintained properly. I do have an old copy-of-a-copy manual showing the lubrication points, so that helps!

The pins have a life-expectancy of about three years. In 5-pin, there are rubber rings around the pins which need to be replaced roughly on an annual basis. After time though, the groove in the pins starts to wear out and it can't hold the rings in place anymore. This was the problem we were having (as well as purely cosmetic); after two hits, the rings would come off the pins and you've have to go back, shut the machine down, crawl into it and retrieve the ring, try to get it back onto the pin, etc. New Pins + New Rings = No More Crawling Into The Machine = Happy Owners + Happy Customers. :)

[ponyguy]

I had to go looking for videos of string pinsetters (and I never could find video of 5-pin pinsetters). Crazy looking things, but overall probably simpler than the free-fall pinsetters, and I was reading that some bowlers actually prefer them because the limited travel means the pins are more likely to take out pins near them. Sounds like the alley you took over has been lacking in needed maintenance for a long time!

[equusmaximus]

The pins can travel to the length of their strings, which means that they're pefectly capable of flying around and knocking down other pins in their own lane, but yeah, they're not too likely to fly into one of the other lanes and knock a pin down. The bowling balls however... I actually threw a gutter-ball that bounced out of my lane, and into the lane next to me, knocking down a couple of pins! I didn't even know that was possible!

Unfortunately, the previous owner let a lot of things slide, so we've been playing catch-up for quite a while. We open to full regular hours again tomorrow, so here's hoping things start picking up again! :)