A small rate over a big house
Under two stoppages per hundred games reads as a machine in good order, and on one lane it is. Twenty-four lanes running 6.5 bowler-games an hour for twelve hours is 1,872 games, and at 1.8 per hundred that is 33.7 stoppages — one somewhere in the building every 21.4 minutes, all night.
At 4.5 minutes of lane downtime each, that is 151.7 lane minutes, or 2.5 lane hours. Against 17,280 lane minutes open it is 0.88 percent, which sounds like rounding error, and it is 16.4 games that were never bowled — $90.35 at five fifty a game, every night the house is full.
Downtime is mostly waiting
The two minute figures on the page are deliberately separate. Lane downtime is from the stop to the next ball; mechanic time is what the work took. At the defaults they are 4.5 and 3, and the gap is the wait for somebody to arrive. That gap is why staffing changes lane downtime without touching the stoppage rate, and why a log that only records repair minutes will tell you the machines are fine while the lanes disagree.
One mechanic on a twelve hour shift has 720 minutes. The stoppages want 101, which is 14 percent — comfortable, until you notice that is 34 separate interruptions to whatever else was planned.
Cycles between stoppages is the machine number
Stoppage counts move with trade. A quiet week produces fewer jams and says nothing about the machines. Cycles between stoppages divides that out: at 21 cycles a game and 1.8 stoppages per hundred games it is 1,167 cycles between stops, and that figure only moves when the machine does. Track it monthly and a drift shows up before a bad night makes it obvious. The house runs 39,312 machine cycles on a full day at these numbers, which is the scale the wear is happening at.
What is deliberately absent
There is no procedure here. Not for clearing a jam, not for reaching into a machine, not for going down a lane or into the pit. A pinsetter is powered machinery that cycles without warning and the pit is where it does it. Everything on this page is arithmetic on minutes somebody else already recorded, and it is not a maintenance instruction of any kind.
Questions people ask
What counts as a stoppage?
Anything that takes a lane out of play and needs somebody to attend to it — pins out of place, a ball that did not return, a deck that did not set, a scoring fault at the machine end. Count what your log counts, and keep counting the same thing, because the value of the number is in the trend rather than the level.
Why are lane downtime and mechanic time separate fields?
Because they are different quantities and only one of them is about the machine. Lane downtime includes the wait for somebody to arrive, which is a staffing number; mechanic time is the work. Keeping them apart is what lets the page show that another person on the floor cuts lost lane hours without changing the stoppage rate at all.
How do I count machine cycles a game?
Watch one machine through a full game and count. It differs by machine type and by how the deck is set, and it is not something this page will tell you, because it would be a manufacturer figure stated as fact. Once you have your own number the cycles-between-stoppages figure becomes comparable month to month.
How do I clear a jam?
That is not answered here and will not be. A pinsetter is powered machinery that cycles without warning, and the pit behind the foul line is inside its working envelope. Whatever procedure your house uses comes from the machine documentation and from whoever is trained and authorised to do it.