During my 50 years as a head mechanic, I have never cleaned pins. (1960 to 2010) Once you remove the finish, recleaning is now mandatory. Machine maintenance is more important than cleaning pins. Some centers in the late 50's would wash and then coat the pins with lacquer on a "V" rack, by pouring lacquer over the pins and allow them to drip dry. Massive waste of time.
It won’t be a waste of time as it could save from buying pins repeatedly every 4 Years. If you have an assistant mechanic, you can just cycle the lane to clear all pins and turn it off and hand over your assistant mechanic all the pins to clean them off, then you can proceed to clean the pinsetter. Its a win-win
A simple tip. When the machine cycles and the pins land to respot... it should make one noise of 10 pins hitting the deck at once. Not 10 different noises. Just 1 clap.
So much wasted time. Leave the machine on. Turn the pit off, sweep the deck. Then cycle the machine on first ball and stop the table halfway down. Remove the jam turn the table back on, cycle the machine to spot a full rack on done. Also you shouldn’t let the cups snap back. Hold the cups with one hand, remove the jam with the other and let the cups back gently. Allowing them to snap like that can break the yoke.
I very rarely cycle the machine because you can cause a broken pin cup or damage the shuttle or bin parts, or as mentioned, a broken table yoke. I have seen many shortcuts mistakes since starting in late 1970 with 82-30 machines.
@derekdietz5782 I do it that way a lot of time because it's faster, but on second ball If I'm concerned the jam can damage parts by attempting to cycle I just flip the black switches off, run the table down with the contactor, move the cups carefully with one hand while removing stuck pins with the other. I gently release pressure and let the cups go vertical (while watching my fingers of course) then run the table back to zero position using the contactor, zero the chassis and cycle a full rack. That's how I handle extreme table jams and it only takes me 30 to 45 seconds typically. I've only been doing this 6 years but we've had no injuries so far. I guess ultimately all of these methods work fine as long as no one is in serious danger and parts aren't being destroyed
Here’s a tip: If the Pinspotter had an 82-90XL Chassis, you can lower the Table down by just pressing the Table button without having to crank the Table down.
