FORUM

Well, I changed my mind re my above post and think I have to accept that they were hand filled hoppers based upon the information that has come forward.
I recently heard from another employee of Streets who worked on these games and I've put his story in the Arena together with just about everything else I have about the company: Streets Ahead, Innovative Automatics 1926-82 (A view from the inside).

I have seen some older Streets Wheel Em In machines with a vertical rubber conveyor belt right at the back, about 8 inches wide, with rows of short brass spikes in zig zags across the belt (several inches apart) all the way around the belt sticking through about an inch on the outer side of the belt.
The bottom of the revolving belt allowed the brass spikes to enter the lower hopper from the underside, the spikes pushed through the pennies and lifted them in a constant flow all the way up to a top hopper to drop them and roll down a long chute to allow the tubes to fill by gravity and then out to the cash box chute, hence the tubes cut at different heights. The zig zags presumably prevented coins being dumped at the top hopper all at once and jamming. You could clearly hear them filling up when the machine was being played a lot.
The tubes could never have been filled manually they are not long enough and would have emptied within an hour.

Ah at last - that makes sense and is exactly the sort of thing I imagined.
It's frustrating that nobody could come up with a picture of this and the two chaps who remember working on them did not describe this important and most mysterious part of the puzzle. In fact the only pictures of the mechanism we have fail to show any of this coin conveyor mechanism.

As you say, it would be hopeless if you had to manually refill them, especially as they received lots of play and the hoppers at the back were quite inaccessible. I'll see if I can get a comment from Bob who used to build them.

moonriver wrote: ↑Sun Dec 09, 2018 8:42 pm I have seen some older Streets Wheel Em In machines with a vertical rubber conveyor belt right at the back, about 8 inches wide, with rows of short brass spikes in zig zags across the belt (several inches apart) ...

18 months late to the party but whilst I don’t have any photos, I remember exactly what you are saying. I often watched them being opened up as pennies got caught up. Missed this post otherwise I could have saved a lot of guesswork.

I would like to put another machine in the mix, it is a Prospector and works very much like wheel em in etc.
It is a very popular machine but you do have to fill the payout tubes yourself which is a daily job when you're busy.
I have just had it in the workshop and finally got the belt running at the right speed and a full service.

I'll be visiting to see this rarity in action as soon as this virus carry-on is over.
Can you open the arcade as a protest against the American police? That seems to be 'essential' as far as the authorities are concerned.

Added to the Museum.