Candlepin Pinsetters
The most common candlepin pinsetters were made by a company named Bowl Mor, which was founded in the 1940s by two attorneys, Howard Dowd and R. Lionel Barrows. According to the International Candlepin Bowling Association (ICBA), Dowd and Barrows were searching for business venture that could weather an economic depression. Marketing research on their part found that participant sports met this requirement, and that bowling was one of the top three participant sports at the time. The first Bowl Mor pinsetters were installed at the now-defunct Whalom Park amusement park in 1949. Though no longer manufactured, refurbished units, parts and maintenance support are available from several vendors.
Bowl Mor pinsetters have a depressed pit approximately 14" long at the end of the bowling lane, placed about 4" below the level of the lane surface, with a curtain behind it, hanging past the lane surface but not touching the bottom of the pit. The curtain arrests the backwards motion of struck balls and pins, so that they fall onto the pit. When a reset takes place, a sweep bar descends, driven by a chain drive system on each side of the machine, and sweeps the pins and balls off the lane, through the depressed area, and past the curtain and onto a rotating turntable. Here, pins and balls separate, being spun off the steadily rotating turntable by centrifugal force into the elevators.
An elevator composed of a rotating rack of open frames (similar to an industrial toaster) catches the candlepins and hauls them towards the top of the machine, and then turns 90 degrees to bring the pins horizontally across, bringing the pins past ten conveyors each wide enough to hold pins in a lengthwise orientation. Unlike the pinspotters used for tenpins and duckpins, since candlepins have identical "ends" to them, the machine does not have to orient the candlepins in one particular direction. The pins fall off the end of the conveyors into spotting tubes, mounted at their base onto the plate that forms the main part of the spotting table. Just as the sweep nears the forward end of its travel, and begins to move out of the way while ascending to its resting position, the table drops to the metal plate pindeck at the end of the lanebed, and release a set of pins, and then ascends to its own resting position, ready to be filled with pins once more.
A separate elevator next to the turntable transports the balls to the ball return system, which has a near-vertical ramp that the balls roll down to gain enough momentum to roll through either an above-lane or submerged trough back up the alley, entering the ball return rack next to the approach area where players can grab them. Bowl Mor pinsetters are stocked with 24 to 27 pins, and are deemed substantially more reliable than typical Ten-pin bowling pinsetters. Due to the playing rules of candlepin bowling allowing fallen "dead wood" pins to remain on the lane between each ball's roll, no provision has ever been made for "spotting cells" in a candlepin pinsetter's spotting table, simplifiying the machines' design. Most parts of the machine are driven by chains - especially the sweep board's drive system, on two L-shaped tracks on either side of the unit - or belts. A Bowl Mor unit weighs approximate 1,450 pounds (660 kg), and draws 24 amperes at 110 volts from three-wire 110-220 volt service mains. The ICBA lists the cost of a refurbished Bowl Mor unit at approximately $5000.
AMF manufactured candlepin pinsetters for a short time in the 1960s, using a Bowl Mor-style spotting table and an adapted tenpin-style sweep bar that operated at an unusually rapid pace during its sweep.
Unless triggered into action by an automated scoring unit, candlepin pinsetters must be started by the bowler at the conclusion of a frame, by using a button or foot pedal operated switch to start the reset cycle.
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