Bowl-Mor was also available in Japan and they only made Tenpin Pinsetters. Many Centers in America and around the world are very successful with their Brunswick or AMF Pinsetters, so they don’t need other 3rd Party Company Pinsetters like Bowl-Mor, Switch Bowling or even Mendes to have high quality pinsetters.
Bowl-Mor got a jump on the Candlepin market. My grandfather bought the Bowl-Mor J model in 1958. It was a pretty simple machine, that was easy for a non-mechanic to make quick repairs. I can only remember going to one bowling alley that had a different machine, which was the Bowl Fast machine. It always seemed to be very slow, because the tubes would come down, and then after a few seconds, you could actually see the pins slide down into them, and then they stayed still for a couple more seconds, to make sure the pins were still. My dad worked at that alley when he was a kid, and said that there was no catwalk, so there were some repairs that actually required taking much of the machine apart. That didn’t happen with the Bowl-Mor.
You'd have to machine your own spare parts... but... I'd love to have a center full of these. They were built by BowlMor when Otis Elevator owned them. These things would be built like brick ****houses!! They'd run forever!!
Lazy Mechanics with Crappy Pinsetters are hard to deal with for Leagues. Trust me I’ve experienced this twice in my hometown with 2 out of 3 Ten Pin Centers here with all 3 are poorly maintained. Poor Countries doesn’t have a clue for Proper Pinsetter Preventive Maintenance which I lived here in the Philippines that is a Poor Asian Country but good thing most centers were properly maintained, the place where I lived in, our League was so unlucky to live with a rotten reality.
