Ok, so it's a Pepsi machine and not a great pyramid. But it must weigh at least half as much. Did I mention that soda machines are really, really heavy? In the house! Yes, it's in the house now. Yes, I need to start keeping my eye out for sales on soda. Yes, I did it by myself. And no Mom, I didn't hurt myself. This is definitely an exercise in the use of mechanical advantage and simple machines: wheels, ramps, and wedges. Before we get started though, let's take a moment...

Last night when I got home the first thing I did was tinker with the Pepsi machine some more. I got out the flashlight and searched all over looking for the thermostat control (still haven't found it). While searching I found the rod linkage that goes onto the narrow slot. Didn't find any cams, although I'm considering trying to fabricate them. I have a drawing on the inside of the door that shows what it looks like. I'm not sure how old the machine is, but it's largely an...

Picked up a Pepsi machine today. I can't believe how heavy it is. It weighs at least twice as much as an arcade or pinball, well over 500 pounds. This is as far as I could lug it by myself. I will have to wait for someone to come over to get it into the house. The only thing that I know that definitely works is the refrigerator. It gets quite cold. I can't get it to do anything else though. When I load cans they just fall right through. If I put in money, it spits it out, even if I...

After years of searching, I finally picked up my first jukebox on Sunday. I have been looking for an AMI model C that I could afford for about 3 years. Back when I first got into the arcade thing, I was at my parents house discussing the stuff that used to be in the basement at my grandma's house. One of the things that was there was a jukebox, but we had no idea how old it was or what model or anything. After doing some searches on the internet for pictures we decided that it was probably...

Just picked up a 13 foot Skee Ball machine. Price was right, it was local, I've got room, couldn't resist. :-) The previous owners had unloaded it on me because they were unable to repair it. Plugged it in and didn't get anything on the score board, but it made noise and I could coin it up and manually flip the ball switches and get a reaction. Found the wire for the display was plugged in the wrong way. Turning it the right way got all the segments to light up, but nothing would...