Post #304601 by AkuAku on Mon, May 7, 2007 10:46 AM

Hi, well... thank you to everyone who took the time to reply to me!! You guys rock. Just to let you know I'm a specialist coin-op machine restorer and have been all my life. My parents were machine operators before I was born in '69 and they were also antique collectors, so we always had a crazy house. I started restoring machines on the school holidays from about 10, then left school at 16 in 1985 to start full time.

I've discovered many original finishes hidden under newer paint, though from my first quick look at these castings it did appear they were stripped first. I only purchased the machine on Sat afternoon, along with 8 other unrestored machines, and as I'm busy working for another collector at the moment I've had no time to investigate the machine very much *** I just went to take some more photos and quickly noticed that there is old grey paint over-spray on the interior of the rear wooden case! I also noticed that there is newer wooden side veneeer added afer the grey paint was applied. So this says that someone decided to renovate this machine at a later date with the red/blue paint and wooden sides to look like most standard slot cabinets. Imagine a row of 20 of these things painted up completely stone fleck grey!!!! Awesome

I also noticed that there's a hole for the overflow of coins in the base of the cabinet. So once the front jackpot has filled up the excess coins would normally flow into the base of a machine into a cashbox. But with this hole the coins had to drop further into a sub-base of some kind. So there was definately a matching stand for this machine, but what???????

I have come across one image of another Aku Aku machine that was sold at auction in 1989. While it does have a theme to it you can't tell that it's a head, so I don't believe it's right either. It has a random jungle camo background with some stylized shapes next to the nose. I found that photo in a 1989 Loose Change by chance a week before I found the machine, (having never known the thing existed, how's that for synchronicity?!) I was instantly interested in it as I'm a fan of Tiki design/culture.

As the machine was originally found without a mechanism I was very lucky that it still has it's original award glass, because this shows what the reel strip symobols once were. The previous owner found the correct 50c mech for this machine but it obviously has the standard fruit symbols used on most normal machines. I have a kick arse photo printer so I can make my own replacement strips using the award glass as my template.