Old locks not good enough

[treefrog]

This seller of this Aristocrat obviously felt that old ace type locks were not secure enough, and they are probably right as they are easily picked....the replacement commonly used of front doors would surely increase the value of your asset as they are good enough for houses..

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll? ... K:MEWAX:IT

[malcymal]

What a shame, it actually looks pretty clean from the photo. For an Aristocrat that chome looks good. Ace locks are so easy to secure. My old Sega Continental needed 2 new ones. Went on to the sega continental parts catalogue (1969 ish), wrote down the code of the ACE lock. Took it to my lock smith, hey presto, the exact Ace lock with part number still in stock, £7 each with 2 keys. So the original locks are still out there. My local arcade gave me 10 brand new orginal ones in a bag from their Bally Spares as i did them a favour and sourced them an old Bally for their working museum. Perhaps on his front door he has an Ace lock??

[gameswat]

You could be right and it's a lazy restorer. But most probably an old operator who converted the lock. My father had a few dodgy sites and one in particular was constantly being hit. We had a lot of old machines there making very good cash so one by one we had to add these huge and ugly hasp and staples locking bars, as used on gates. I hated doing it because it meant drilling holes in the cabinets. Sure enough once we did a few machines they hit the next machines without them. Until they were all like safes! This really pissed off the crooks so they snapped the gun stocks on a few Chicago coin rifle galleries. I hand made several replacements and then later converted old 22 rifle butts for the job. Though usually as theft was rare we didn't make them hard to break into. But the thieves didn't realise how easy most machines were to open and they did hundreds of dollars of damage to get into a cahbox that was nearly empty! In fact most pinballs originally came with a special locking system that locked in three separate positions. We always removed the extra two locking bars so that someone could pop the lock latch very easily with just a screwdriver. As well as repairing theft damage it also meant a machine was off location for a quite a few days while we repaired it. We were once given a 1990s Williams pinball that was almost NOS condition, except someone tried to take the money by smashing the playfield glass, then prying off the instruction card apron, then smashing through the playfield with a hammer or crow bar!! Ha, this thing was ruined. The operators were smart enough to remove a few circuit boards while it sat around before they eventually told us to take it away.