It's the late 1800s in California, and we’re in the middle of gold rush country. The wood-framed 5x3 reels are filled with lanterns, donkeys, pickaxes and shovels. Gold dust shimmers in the air around the reels, and a jolly banjo beat joins the harmonica. The free Gold Rush slot is certainly atmospheric, and its graphics are appealing. This is a very modern fruit machine that is still in the pubs. Good fun machine based on the Gold Rush. Great features & sounds. Ideal for your games room.Made by Barcrest. ABuilt by Pragmatic Play, Gold Rush pokie is one of the medium-high volatile games in which you head directly for dynamite. With 25 paylines and 5 reels, this pokie is a treat for anyone. The broad betting range is a welcome sign to diverse gamblers. Players can enjoy the real money game for as low as A$0.25 up to a maximum of A$125 per spin. UK Fruit Machines. Although fruit machines in the UK are changing fast, there are still a lot of fans of the classic games. That is, the games with nudge and hold features, with real spinning reels (as opposed to video slots) and secret hidden features. Unlike USA casino slots, the old-fashioned UK slot machine games actually involve a bit of. Gold Rush 4 Player Sit Down Fruit Machine Barcrest. Condition is Used. Collection in person only. Machine was all working a few months back, how ever needs some work doing to it.Plastic bits need screwing or glueing back on, and needs few bulbs. Needs a good clean inside and out.Has been updated to take new £1 coins. Comes with 4 chairs,Missing a couple of.
Another interesting aspect of the machine are the name(s), handwritten in pencil on the inside of the machine. It looks like “Chas Drebe [Lon?] Otto Berger”. But we have not been able to find any record in the history of this (or these) individuals, so we are not yet sure what his connection to the machine was. Maybe he was the one who made the modifications to it, and then proudly signed his handiwork, like so many artists.
One of the most fun aspects of the machine is figuring out how it worked. With the help of our friends over in maintenance again, we began to figure out some of the details about how it worked. The wheel is divided into 138 sections, each in one of seven colors that corresponds to a pay-out value of 10 cents (red and black), 25 cents (green), 50 cents (cream), $1.00 (pink), $2.50 (yellow), or $5.00 (blue). A player would insert a nickel, turn the first handle, and the nickel would drop down into the appropriate color track below.
The player could then turn the big handle to start the wheel spinning. If the wheel did not stop on the same color as the bet, the coin was collected in the bag that we see inside the machine on the back. But, if you were one of those lucky individuals who happened to guess right, the pegs at the bottom half of the machine would release the right number of nickels and you could get your “pay-out” in the cup on the side. The machine also appears to have been able to re-load itself, since there is a “bridge” that can be raised and lowered to add more nickels into the track.
Willing to take a chance? Well, it might not be all luck. We figured out the system of wiring on the back of the wheel, which tells the machine what value it has landed on and activates the whole sequence of money (the wires in the slits farthest from the center of the wheel correspond to a lower value). But one peg is blocked by a piece of wood, which makes us think the machine could have been rigged. So miners would place their bets on blue, never knowing that the object itself, and not bad luck, were behind the failure to get the big $5.00 pay-out. Overall, the machine survived the past and came down to us through history in good shape. It was dusty and dirty, but with careful cleaning, I was able to get it back to its old but clean state. I also made a top for it out of archival materials, to prevent dust from getting in the machine when it goes on display in the museum.
It had another type of accumulation too- paint splatter from being in a room that was painted without covering up the objects first. Using a paint that has the special property of being removable if someone wants to take it off the machine in the future (an important consideration in doing conservation work), I painted over the splatter. Some of the other work done on the machine involved using different glues (which are also removable) to secure loose pieces. An example of this was in the case of fixing a previous repair, to the slot where a nickel would go to place a bet on red. The bottom of the slot had broken, and at some point in the past, someone had repaired it with tape.Tape turns yellow and brittle with time, and eventually loses its ability to hold things together, as anyone who has an old scrapbook knows. So I removed the tape and applied a glue that will last a lot longer. Another example is the beading that was applied around the decorative panel on the front. You can see how it has started to pop off. This happens because wood shrinks and expands when the humidity and temperature change. We can therefore conclude that this gaming machine was probably in an unstable environment before it came to the National Park Service. As the panel beneath shrank, the beading had less space and so it came off. This shows how one of the best things you can do to care for old objects, especially wood furniture, is to keep them in places in your house where the humidity does not change as much. This will reduce the chances of the wood warping and cracking, and we will have these beautiful and functional pieces for years to come.
