Happ coin doors

Suzo-Happ, formerly known as Happ Controls, produces their own doors as well as having bought out Wells Gardner’s coin door business, who bought out Coin Controls. Pinball collectors will see these on new Stern titles, starting sometime after 2003. Before that, most games were using Coin Controls/WG doors made by Happ.

Jersey Jack Pinball and Spooky Pinball also use these doors in non-DBV versions. Spooky and JJP tend to use games without the DBV setup (at least on their flyers) since home use doesn’t benefit from the extra DBV bits.

WPT with Happ DBV door
WPT with Happ two-hole DBV door
2023 Stern Foo Fighters Pro coin door, probably Suzo-Happ upstacker door 40-0696-30.

By 2023, the door had changed slightly. I’m told this is cost-reduced, but it does appear very similar to the previous door.

There are at least three types of Happ DBV (dollar bill validator) doors that appear on pinball machines. On the two pictured here, earlier doors have a center gusset (where Stern adds a sticker) and two DBV holes. Newer doors have one gusset and a large DBV hole for newfangled validators. This transition was around 2014/2015. This change caused Stern to stop putting a logo sticker on the coin door, but on games made with both coin doors (like my Star Trek), they applied the sticker anyway.

There is a third type of door with just smaller one hole for an upstacker, lacking the upper hole. IPDB has an example on a JJP Wizard of Oz. I don’t think Stern used this door.

Happ’s web site tends to reflect current inventory, not historical parts, but the relevant section is here. The apparently current DBV door is here.

I prefer the older DBV door, because there’s a mount point for a slam tilt switch, which the Stern harness supports on both coin door types. Marco Specialties has a kit for this switch. Marco’s application list is wrong because there are a lot of SAM games that this won’t just fit.

For instance, Stern’s Star Trek was made with both of these doors. Unfortunately, that kit doesn’t work in my 2015-manufacture game because the mount point is missing. But old Midway doors used a different approach that will work here: This bracket mounts the slam switch to the lock. In this case, the right thing to do is to use that bracket and make your own “kit” for the switch, since it’s just a couple pins and a Molex connector. In this case I mix-and-matched parts since I had the kit from Marco, but if I install another one, I’ll probably just use the Happ kit and make the wiring harness.

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