coin bucket spring?

[Jamesbeat]

I have an O/U coin door which came with a white plastic coin bucket.

The bucket has a 3"x3" flat metal spring attached to the inside.

The spring is located directly underneath the holes where the coins drop into the bucket, so the coins bounce off the spring before dropping into the bucket, kinda like a little 'diving board' for want of a better term.

I have looked at other coin buckets (including the same design as mine) on Google image search, and none of them appear to have this spring.

Does anyone know what it is for?

My two theories so far are:

Make the coins bounce before falling into the bucket, so they are distributed evenly instead of piling up in one spot.

A security device to prevent an employee with a key to the coin door (but without a key to the coin bucket) fishing coins out through the holes in the top of the coin bucket housing.

[paigeoliver]

I have the spring in some of my games too. No clue what it is for.

[Jamesbeat]

I'm pretty convinced that my security theory above is what it's for.

I read somewhere that operators would sometimes have different keys for the upper and lower doors so that employees could service the machines without having access to the coin bucket.

An evil employee could probably fish coins out through the slots in the top of the coin compartment without having to unlock the lower door, but this spring would prevent that.

The possibility of theft also explains why the coin compartment has slots in the top instead of just having a big hole.

When I took a closer look at the spring, it didn't look like it was manufactured that way.
It was a bit rough looking, and the holes where it was pop riveted to the bucket weren't level.
It looks to me like an alteration made by an operator rather than a feature installed by the manufacturer.

The reason I'm so interested is that my spring is a rusty mess.
I didn't want to just throw it away and then find out it was important!

Now I am satisfied that it was installed by an operator, I drilled out the pop rivets and the spring is now in the trash. The coin door still functions completely normally.

[mgb]

That's weird, I've worked on a lot of commercial machines and have never seen any kind of spring in any coin buckets.

[Jamesbeat]

Maybe it was just one operator (or chain of operators).

I snapped a photo before I removed it:

[mgb]

Oh, that's not what I was picturing at all.

Yeah I would definitely think that's some kind of baffle to prevent stealing coins through the top door.

And yes you're right, a lot of places have it where only certain employees (managers, owner) would have a key to the bottom door which has access to the coin box but the typical employee may still have keys to the top door for fixing coin jams, etc.

[Jamesbeat]

It's quite a clever design, and it made a very satisfying 'clunk' when the coin dropped through, but it had to go.

It was really rusty (that photo was taken after I scrubbed the upper surface of it with steel wool) and I couldn't clean it properly without removing it.
I have a rivet gun, but I didn't have the right size rivets on hand to replace it, and it was therefore more trouble than it was worth.

I guess I'll just have to keep a close eye on myself to make sure so don't steal any of my tokens