Hot Pots (Maygay)
Introduction
A friend of mine was out for a ride on his bike, and he spotted, well he said an “arcade machine”, in a ditch. So naturally, I had to drive out and have a look. Turns out it was a Maygay Hot Pots fruit machine!
Story
In probably the most ill-advised thing I’ve ever done, I once pulled a Maygay HotPots fruit machine out of a ditch in a country road in Essex. Initially, I’d assumed it’d been stolen - but the locks hadn’t been tampered with at all. It’d just been dumped, probably no longer an earner.
To give a little context on why this was a bad idea, the road is a rural one, it runs between a lot of farm land and fields. The ditches are quite large, and the road is positioned quite high, likely to prevent flooding. So when I pulled up in my estate car and saw it, my initial thoughts were:
I should just leave this, there’s no way I’m going to be able to pick this up on my own… It’s only a fruit machine - I don’t even collect fruit machines!
It’s probably broken too … how on earth am I going to even get it out of the ditch, let alone in the car!
And so yes, I thought … best leave it. Wait … I’m here now, maybe I’ll just give it a go and see if I can do it. And so I did. WOW these things are heavy! I managed to sort of, pivot it out of the ditch. Then stand it up, lay it down and from the end - lift it up to slide it into the car. I’m making it sound simple (or even easy!) here - but truth is, I had to spend a good day or so in bed as I strained myself doing it.
The Machine
I got help to get the machine into the flat, all the time I’m thinking to myself “why did I bother to do this?!” But I picked the locks and opened it, and plugged it in (it did nothing) … I diagnosed it in all of about 5 minutes, a fuse in the PSU had gone. Once replaced the game seemed to be fully working!
I’d never really played on fruit machines particularly, but this was actually kind of fun. Friends would come over, and they seemed to play it more than the video games! I kept it for many years, and only moved it on when I moved into a smaller place up in Lincolnshire. It was a lot of fun while it lasted.
