Crossword clues for pinsetter
Wiktionary
n. 1 (context bowling originally English) The person that clears fallen pins and resets them in tenpin bowling 2 (context bowling English) The machine that clears fallen pins and resets them in tenpin bowling
Wikipedia
In bowling, a pinsetter, or pinspotter, was originally a person who manually reset bowling pins to their correct position, cleared fallen pins, and returned bowling balls to players. Probably due to the nature of the work (low-paid, often part-time, manual labor that most frequently took place evenings), many pinsetters were teenage boys, and thus pinboy is another name used to describe the job. In 1936 Gottfried Schmidt invented the mechanical pinsetter while with the AMF firm, which largely did away with pinsetting as a manual profession, although a small number of bowling alleys still use human pinsetters. While humans usually no longer set the pins, a pinchaser, or in slang 'pin monkey', often is stationed near the equipment to ensure that it is clean and working properly, and to clear minor jams.
Many pinsetters are integrated with electronic scoring systems of varying sophistication. While many pinsetters have a manual reset button to use in case the pinsetter does not automatically activate at the correct time, other types have no automatic tracking of the state of the game – especially for the candlepin and duckpin bowling sports which use smaller balls – and are almost always manually activated.
The design of the machines varies. Several types of bowling make use of different designs for machines due to the different size and shape of the pins and balls. Common part descriptions for just about all pinspotting units consist of:
- Rake/Sweep Bar – removes fallen and leftover pins from the pin deck area of the lane. The sweep may also stay lowered throughout the table operating cycle, to act as the primary physical protective barrier against improperly thrown balls
- Spotting Deck/Table – also used in pre-automated manual units, places a new "rack" of pins onto the lane for the next frame, and in tenpins and duckpins, lifts the remaining pins for the sweep to remove fallen pins for the bowler's next roll of the ball in those games
- Deck/Table Shield (Brunswick A series only) – a fixed sheet metal enclosure, usually fastened to the spotting table's framework and diagonal forward frame edges, provides secondary protection for the spotting table system from improperly thrown balls (in addition to the sweep bar) and flying pins, and covers the pin chutes that are used to transfer the pins from the characteristic, cage-like Brunswick-design rotating pin storage turret above the table downwards into the deck for transfer onto the lane's pin deck area.
- Pit – a collection area behind the lane where balls and struck pins collect for sorting, actually a part of any regulation bowling lane.
- Pin Elevator – brings pins upwards out of the lane's pit to the top of the unit for re-racking for successive frames, usually in the form of a vertically-oriented toroid-shape system at the extreme rear of the pinspotter for tenpin bowling units, to deliver pins upwards from the pit into the pin storage system.
- A system of pin storage for storing the next full "rack" of pins after delivery to it by the pin elevator system – this can exist within (or as part of) the table, or above and/or behind the table
- Ball Return (or "Ball Lift") – Removes the bowler's ball from the lane's "pit" and sends it rolling back to the bowler on the ball return track, located between paired lane beds, back to the ball return unit at the "heads" of the lanes. The ball lift's components are designed to physically separate the ball from the fallen pins in the pit, and will not send pins into the ball return track.
In the decades leading up to the introduction of the fully automatic units, "semi-automatic" pinsetters, such as the "B-1" and "B-10" units made by Brunswick, basically consisting of just a manually filled "table" similar to those used on the fully automatic units, operating much as the later units' component of the same name operated, were used by human pinsetters to both speed up the manual operation, and assure accuracy of "spotting" the full rack of ten pins for the next frame.1
Usage examples of "pinsetter".
The ball dropped into the gutter and he made another digusted noise as the pinsetter knocked them back.
Hollis sometimes wondered if the day would ever come when he would be watching the automatic pinsetters while waiting for an American nuclear strike to obliterate central Moscow above.
They have twelve lanes of candlepin bowling with cranky automatic pinsetters that usually take the last three days of the week off, a few ancient pinball machines, a juke featuring the greatest hits of I957, three Brunswick pool tables, and a Coke-and-chips counter where you also rent bowling shoes that look like they might have just come off the feet of dead winos.