Learning the ropes with an old Vendo V312. Got some questions for the experts!

[Disappearing Inc]

Hello everyone, I'm very grateful for the existence of this site and for all the people taking time to fill it full of information. I've just entered into the world of vending machines and have a lot to learn about them. But my goal is a small one, just a single machine in a business I'm in the process of starting. I'm setting up a trial-sized computer museum and have decided to add an appropriately vintage Vendo V-312 that I picked up off of Craigslist. Just $150 Canadian!

Now I've already had a couple people tell me the 312 is too old and troublesome. And while I appreciate the advice, I'm not one to shy away from maintaining old, obsolete equipment without the assistance of vendor support. After all, everything else in this building is just as old and outdated and I keep it running. And I figure that even if this machine turns out to be a lemon, it will at least have taught me $150 worth of vending machine repair skills. Speaking of which, I'm coming into this without a clue what I'm doing. That's where I'm hoping you guys can point me in the right direction. 

 

Let's start with the good news. I've already done the following:

The 30 year old machine had 30 years worth of grime inside. To top it off the previous owners had a few cans rupture while trying to figure out how to load this thing. So the first thing I did after getting it unloaded was remove all the parts and wash down the cabinet inside and out. No longer is it sticky, and there are no musty smells.

Half the flavour strips were broken, and I don't want to put modern ones in their place. I was able to carefully tape the original 1980s Pepsi and Diet Pepsi labels back together and they look pretty good. lacanteen kindly mailed me an envelope of new-old-stock flavour strips as well. These will replace things like the sun faded cutout of a Canada Dry box. Thanks again, lacanteen! If anyone else knows a place to find 1980s era Magnum labels, I'd love to hear it. 

The original fluorescent lightbulb connectors were broken. I've temporarily screwed some 4-foot fixtures that were left over from another project into their place just to see the machine lit up, but they're pretty uneven. The next step will be LED.

 

Next up are the parts I know, or at least think I know how to do:

The breach latch is broken. I'm seeing what looks like the same one on eBay listed as a Dixie-Narco part. Unless you guys know they're different I'll go ahead and order one.

The foam insulation around the coolant pipes has fallen apart. Gotta pick up a roll of the stuff on my way down to the shop this week.

The unit sure rattled a lot when running, which I mostly attribute to all the missing screws around the evaporator. Gotta fix that.

The carriage bolts are rusty and spoil the appearance of the outside of the unit. They're leaving rust trails down the otherwise nice black paint. I'll stop by the hardware store to get some shiny new ones soon as well.

I don't think anything has seen any grease in the last decade, so I'd better bust out a tube and make sure the mechanism moves freely.

 

And now we get to the parts I need help with:

The most obvious thing is that something is wrong with the door. When closed and screwed shut, there's a gap of almost 2 inches between the top right corner of the outer door and the frame. The bottom gap and hinge gap are both far smaller. Looking inside, I can see that the rubber bumpers on the inside of the outer door are pressing hard against the inner door. As a test I removed them and the outer door then closes with much less of a gap. Does this mean my inner door is catching on something and not shutting all the way, or could this be an issue of the outer door being mis-aligned in some way? I'll grab some photos in the next couple days to make this clearer.

Possibly related, the door latch plate was mis-adjusted for some time and the floating latch nut has lost a few threads from someone cranking on the t-handle anyway. Would anyone happen to have a spare?

The plastic bottom of the refrigerated section has a number of cracks in it. I wonder if someone climbed in the machine at some point for how many there are. I'm betting they'll let condensed water into the insulation where mold is sure to follow. Anyone have advise for sealing them up? Some silicone sealant, perhaps? Or should I buy one of those liner repair kits I've seen advertised for refrigerators?

The evap and condenser fans are a bit noisy. Is it okay to oil/grease them, or do they just get replaced when they age?

And lastly (Ha!) I need a coin acceptor. I'm up in Canadaland so it needs to accept Canadian money, including the revised $1 and $2 coins that came out in 2014. Would anyone here be able to sell me one, or is there a preferred place to buy used ones up here?

 

I'll be taking more pictures of my progress as I get this old beast ready to run again, and I'm sure I'll be adding a lot more questions along the way. So let me say thank you to everyone in advance for the help.

 

Oh, one last thing. I've read that older Vendos sometimes had the troublesome "Lowering deck" mechanism. But the pictures I've seen of it don't look like my unit. Can someone confirm from this picture if that's what this machine has?

 

Edited December 17, 2019 by Disappearing Inc

[AZVendor]

Whether you believe your own photos or not you have a lowering shelf machine.  Look down in the wide columns and you'll see metal 1" wide bars that rise and fall as the cans are dispensed - lowering shelves.  The narrow columns have rotors.

[Disappearing Inc]

Oh, interesting, this unit has both types? I hadn't noticed until you pointed it out that the wide and narrow columns had different mechanisms. That makes a lot more sense now.

While I'm asking dumb questions, maybe you can tell me why these units have both wide and narrow columns in the first place. Is it just for fitting one more column into a narrow machine? Or is it to give less space to less desirable flavours?

[orsd]

Both. It’s to give more space to popular flavors and to give more selections of flavors.

[Disappearing Inc]

I spent a little more time tidying the machine today. Got the temporary lights aligned better and removed the old dead ballast from the bottom. Realized the plastic face of the coin return is broken though, so I'll be adding one of those to the shopping list.

 

I also swapped out a few of the flavour strips with the ones lacanteen sent. From normal height you don't notice that the Pepsi and Diet Pepsi labels are held together with tape, but up close they show their flaws. Ahh well, they're 30 years old.

 

I forgot to take a picture but the door is closing better than before. It still sticks out a little more at the top than at the bottom, but now it's about a half an inch. Don't quite know how I fixed it though, so I might need some help with it in future!

Edited December 18, 2019 by Disappearing Inc

[Disappearing Inc]

It's been a busy few weeks, but I've found a few more days to work on the Pepsi machine. I'm happy to report it is currently running and dispensing! Ahh, but it wasn't easy getting it here. My goal was to have the machine running by the 28th for a shop party, that way the guests could test it out and hopefully reveal any problems with it. I only got the machine ready at 2 AM the night before.

 

To start with, the rusty carriage bolts have been replaced, the one seized adjustment foot has been loosened up, the door has been re-aligned, and more junk has been cleaned out of every nook and cranny.

I cleaned the evaporator fan and shroud. The thermostat tube looked like it had been given to a gorilla to play with, so I carefully straightened it out and re-shaped it as seen here. I couldn't find any photo of the original shape so I hope this is more or less how it's supposed to look. It seems to be working at least. Cans are consistently very cold without getting slushy.

 

 

I asked a few more people about sealing the cracked plastic bottom of the fridge section without getting any concrete suggestions, so in the end I decided to do an experiment. The bottom of my machine is now coated in everybody's favourite late-night infomercial product, flex seal!

It took an entire can, but water is no longer getting into the bottom insulation. 

 

At this point I finally got around to reinstalling the vending mechanism. How the hell do you guys move these things? I spent the better part of an hour figuring out how to get it in by myself and woke up the next day with a very sore back. And mine's not even very big!

The first tests revealed that stacks 1 and 2 were both noisier than the rest, and that 2 would sometimes stop half way through a vend cycle. So I pulled out the lowering shelves and the bails for a thorough cleaning. To my surprise they're all in very good condition. There's corrosion, sure, but the contact surfaces and bearings are all perfectly smooth and even. I don't see any unusual wear or slop. All they needed was to have the old sticky grease cleaned off and fresh applied, then both stacks were running smooth and quiet again. 

 

Now for the bad news. While replacing the rotted foam pipe insulation on the cooling deck I aggravated an already damaged section and caused a pinhole leak. The problem was at a spot where the capillary tube had been yanked upward, causing a crack in the solder that held it to the tube below. The force ripped a tiny opening in the thin walled capillary tube. 

Now, my cooling deck is a bit old and rough, and this was over Christmas, so paying a proper commercial refrigeration repair company to fix the leak was not practical. The one place that was open quoted $490 to replace the line and recharge the system. For that money I'd buy a new cooling deck. Instead I roamed the halls of Home Depot until I found a tube of JB Weld Waterweld putty. It's an epoxy material that's specifically built for copper pipes. And yes, it is an entirely redneck repair for a situation like this, but I have a plan to replace the whole cooling deck in future anyway. I just wanted to get this one running for a little while first. So I squished half the tube of putty over the break, let it set for 24 hours and added a little fresh refrigerant to the system. Then it was just a matter of crossing my fingers and plugging in the machine.

It worked! I'm happy to report that Water weld is able to withstand the pressures and temperatures of refrigeration, at least for a little while. The machine has run for 2 days with deliciously cold cans and plenty of use. I'll be monitoring the patch over the next few months to see how long it lasts.

 

So with the machine finally vending and cooling, I temporarily added a push button to insert credits with for the party and let my guests loose on it. We drank up a good 60 cans that night, and each one was perfectly cooled and vended. So far the old lowering shelf mechanism isn't giving a hint of trouble. Here it is after we ran it to empty.

 

Now for the future. I still have a laundry list of parts and repairs needed for this machine, and I know the refrigeration deck will be a problem again one day. So I'm picking up an ugly but free Vendo machine off of Craigslist later in the week to use as a parts machine. With luck it will have most of the parts this one needs, like the coin acceptor. I'll post an update soon.

Edited December 31, 2019 by Disappearing Inc

[orsd]

Nice.

Some will give you hard time over your methods but hey, if it works it works. If you were trying to make money off this it would not be advised to jerry rig stuff but at the end of the day this is just a hobby machine. 

Only thing I will say, we will typically never remove the vending mechanism/ racks from a machine. I’ve personally never done it and I don’t know anyone who has either. So I can’t help you on a better way to get it back in. Engine picker maybe?

[Disappearing Inc]

I'm well aware that any sane machine operator wouldn't let a fridge like mine go out in revenue service. But I've never claimed to posses a great deal of sanity, so this thing has been given a temporary stay of execution. With luck I'll have a spare deck ready to take its place the moment it fails. So until then it's mostly just a low-stakes experiment to find out whether a jerry-rigged repair like this can actually work for any length of time. Sometimes it's useful to know how long you can get away with doing something the wrong way for. Ever seen a mechanic's beater car? They're often a study in how long you can ignore certain problems for. So I'll let you guys know how far it goes.

I'm also just glad to have this machine temporarily running so I can learn more about the realities of having one. What kind of sales do I make, how often will I need to restock, etc. Hobby machine or not it's helpful to know these things so I can decide how much money to put into its upkeep.

With luck I'll never have to pull the vending mechanism again. Good news is that nearly everything can come out of the machine around it. Really this whole machine has been very nice to work on. I'm constantly being impressed by how straightforward it is to understand the inner workings and figure out how to get it apart. The designers clearly knew that they were putting something together that would need to come apart again. I'd never touched the inside of a vending machine before this one and there's no part of it I haven't been able to remove and work on so far. 

Edited December 31, 2019 by Disappearing Inc

[Disappearing Inc]

I should mention that I pulled the vending mechanism and door when I first picked up the machine so I could load all three separately into a pickup truck. Now that you say that most people just leave it in I have to ask. What is the normal way to move one of these? A large dolly and a box truck with a hydraulic lift gate?

[orsd]

I use a Dutro dolly (heavy duty vending dolly, specially made with 2 extra wheels on a kick out leg for stability) or a pallet jack. As for trucks it’s either a hydraulic lift deck trailer (whole deck drops to ground level) from Sunbelt rentals behind my F150 or a Penske/Ryder lift gate truck if the trailer is not available. I prefer the rail lifts over tuck unders, but rail lifts are hard to find. In any case you want the full size dock height 24/26ft trucks like the Freightliners or Internationals, not the 16 ft Isuzu NPRs. (They have lift gates barely larger than the machine itself.)

 

[Disappearing Inc]

Well the day finally came. I went into the shop on Thursday and heard a hissing noise coming from the vending machine. Opened the door and found it was room temperature inside. The compressor had evidently lost pressure. I haven't pulled it out yet to see where the leak is, but it's not hard to imagine that it was my JB Weld fix. A sad day indeed, especially since I'd just picked up a trunkful of soda to refill it with.

Still, this otherwise scrap cooling deck managed to give ice-cold drinks for 10 solid months after nothing more than a tube of fancy glue and a bit of r134a. If anything it well exceeded my expectations. So while I still wouldn't recommend it as a lasting fix, I can confirm that JB Weld Waterweld Putty is strong enough to temporarily get a fridge working, at least long enough to figure out whether it's worth fixing properly or not. 

Now I need to find a better way to fix this unit. The local fridge repair places have all quoted me hundreds of dollars to rebuild this one, and it doesn't really fit very well since it looks to me like it came out of a Dixie Narco. Plus it's pretty old and rusty. I think I'd rather replace it at this point. Anyone know where I might get a good used one in the Vancouver area?

Other updates: The lowering shelf mechanism has been completely flawless. I haven't had a single mis-vend yet. Knock on wood. The flex-seal however was not a lasting way to patch the cracked up bottom of the cooler area. I can see the cracks have opened up clear through the flex seal again. I may try adding a few more coats to give it one more shot, but I think it's a poor choice for a problem like this.

[orsd]

Thanks for the updates.

Vancouver, WA or Vancouver, BC, Canada?

[Disappearing Inc]

Vancouver, BC. 

Back when I first got this machine I saw a few vending machines on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace ranging from free to $200. If I'd had the room I would have grabbed a couple to learn on and use for parts. Now the supply seems to have dried up.

[AZVendor]

You need to remove the Dixie unit and put an older Vendo unit in it so the freon lines and evaporator fit properly.  Your frankensteined machine will not work correctly with the wrong unit in it.  DOH!  You need a Vendo unit with a tall evaporator so start looking.

[Disappearing Inc]

Hello again, it's been awhile, hasn't it?

Fortunately this update carries good news. I recently picked up a Vendo coke machine from 1991 off Craigslist for $100 CAD and used it to solve a number of my issues. 

Most importantly, it had the correct refrigeration unit in working order. The charge was a bit low due to a leaking schrader valve, so a friend of mine kindly used his equipment to pump the unit down and convert it over to r134a. Now the thing cools like a champ! It also fits much better than the old (Dixie?) unit, which was obviously for a larger vending machine and took up so much room that the inner door pushed against the condenser. No more fitment issues with the new unit.  The condenser fan is a little noisy though, does anyone know whether it's possible to oil these, or is the only solution to just replace the fan motor?

Next, I moved over a number of small parts. The plastic coin return pieces, a not-rusty T handle assembly, the condensation drain parts, etc. There's still a broken burst latch and some flickering neon bulbs, but the unit is otherwise pretty much sorted. Well, except for...

The coin mechanism. I picked up a pair of Coincos off of a seller in Ontario who assured me they were tested. Unfortunately, neither one quite fully works. I had to do a lot of cleaning and a bit of soldering inside to get either of them to work at all. One still has the original board, while the other has been upgraded once in its life to support Canadian loonies and toonies. The newer unit almost works, but the flight deck is apparently way out of calibration. From some research I've done and talking to the guys at Coinco, it appears that the upgraded units no longer have the code in their microcontroller to run the tuning process. And while the older unit still has it, something doesn't work. It'll go into tuning mode and accept a bunch of coins, but seemingly never finish the process. I don't know if this is because of a problem with the board, or if the updated flight deck just cannot be calibrated by an older board. Either way, once I power it back down and stick it in regular mode, it's back to rejecting all the coins I give it. Is there anyone here who knows these units inside and out? I'd be curious to learn a bit more about how they work, as much as a curiosity as anything else.

At the end of the day though, what I really need is to buy a whole working coin unit that has the update for Canadian loonies and toonies from the mid 2010s. Has to be the older 9-pin Jones plug style, the 117v unit. Anyone know a good place to grab one?

Now, here's where you guys are going to laugh at me. I'm thinking about replacing the button board on this 6-flavour machine with one from a larger machine, say, 8 or 9 flavours. But what will the extra buttons be hooked to, you ask? Nothing, of course. Because my plan is to wire them to always show as sold-out, then stick flavour strips in for discontinued sodas. Stuff like Crystal Pepsi, or Jolt Soda. After all, this unit sits in the section of the museum that showcases things from the late '80s and early '90s, so why not have it part of the exhibits? Anyone who has a spare Vendo button board, let me know what you'd want for it. Same goes for anyone with flavour strips for long gone sodas.

That's pretty much it for this update. The museum has been kept closed due to Covid, so the only pressure to fix this machine has been my own stubborn desire to see it working again. Not to mention the need to ensure that our volunteers have a steady supply of cold soda when they're able to attend. 

[orsd]

Nice work. This thing is cleaner than I though it was.

For coin mechs try eBay or look for a vending repair company. Ask for a single price mech. They’ll know what you want. If you do not need loonie/toonie acceptance some American spec mechs have Canadian mode.

As for the larger select panel eBay.

[ScottCrouch]

Hi there, my buddy and I have an old v312m-176 Pepsi machine that we are trying to figure out how to operate. Are there any links or videos that can show us how to fill it up with soda? The machine appears to be in perfect condition as we can tell 

[AZVendor]

You are one post too late to save you from buying a pile of junk.  This is a Vendo "lowering shelf" machine that is very problematic when old and worn out.  There are no parts for it except for generic items like bulbs and coin mechs.  This is the manual, good luck.  https://e4995306-5b39-4820-8d83-ef2846e90a02.usrfiles.com/ugd/e49953_092fd69178c74183a465c100b0c9a56b.pdf