String pinsetters are upending bowling
latimes.com
latimes.com
tl;dw: it reduces the moving parts from thousands to just a hundred, means that the relatively untrained staff can untangle a few pins every night, and not get crushed to death.
Apparently, bowling machines crushing people to death is not as uncommon as we might want it, and therefore, the industry was due for an upgrade.
Anecdotal: I went bowling last week, and my local bowling alley has switched over to this system (Denmark). It wasn’t terrible. I had much more of an issue with the state of the oil pattern than the pins or the pin setter. Our 3 lanes didn’t jam in 2 hours.
Looking at accident reports, it sounds like there are some easy changes, adding guards to the machines and changing industry practices to de-energize the machines during the maintenance activity: https://www.atlantictraining.com/blog/bowling-alley-worker-s...
We must do something
This is a thing
Therefore we must do this.
There are other ways they could make the machine safer that don't involve adding strings and thereby changing the game.
https://raisedbyturtles.org/bowling-deaths-double
It's even better when supposedly one of these deaths occurred due to "Extreme bowling" which apparently involves a half pipe. So yeah, this comes off as extremely misleading and just for clicks.
You'd probably save more lives banning all the beer and unhealthy food served at the alley, or by banning sports with a higher death toll, like soccer.
Strikes me as a way for alleys to operate cheaper by several magnitudes, and then just cover that up in safety rather than say "look people don't want to pay enough to bowl with machines"
Multiple can range from 2 to 2 million and magnitude matters.
Community-centric recreation spaces are getting squeezed out in general, because fewer people have disposable income. And it's not just bowling alleys, with the complex equipment. Skating rinks are basically just a warehouse with some lines on the ground, and they've been going away too.
If skating rinks are going away I would bet they are being replaced by entertainment for people with _more_ disposable income, like trampoline parks. It's a rich country.
> We are losing bowling alleys at a rapid clip, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good here.
This isn't a case of perfect being the enemy of good. The strings aren't good. If that's the future of bowling, then I'm not bowling in the future and no longer care if bowling alleys go away.
Chess robot breaks seven-year-old boy's finger during Moscow Open https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62286017
Everything shown in the industry backs up the claim of its dangerousness to the point where this entire article revolves around an industry changing in order to make up for that.
Why would you, somebody who is not in the industry and has absolutely no clue about this, have an opinion this strongly held?
I disagree with the response about the pin weight, because I've got enough clue about mechanics and safety to know it's very unlikely to be a full explanation. The lifting happens either on a conveyor or the lift/harness. We have existing systems that can ensure you don't crush people with the weight itself this way. The dangerousness may come from different parts like higher torque motors, or exposed parts, or programming issues, or ... So feel free to comment on that if you know the answer.
Basically, it's not just the force to move a single 1.5 kg pin. It's the force needed to move ten of those pins, plus the machinery for lifting and setting them into place, all of which needs to be overbuilt because it's being repeatedly hit by flying pins and possibly even the occasional ricocheting 7kg ball, and needs to stand up to that kind of treatment day in, day out for years or decades without completely falling apart. And then, because people like their games to keep moving, the drive mechanism for moving that whole huge assembly around needs to apply enough force to be able to raise and lower it quite quickly.
I'm no expert in any of this, but just taking one quick look at it I'm not at all surprised to find out that these machines are invariably hazardous. And probably most the ones in operation are even scarier than the one in that video I linked above, because it's a relatively recent model and, at least at the place I have been bowling, all the equipment looks like it could easily be older than I am.
If you want a system that only needs to be able to apply enough force to lift a single 1.5kg pin, well, it sounds like that's why the string setting machine was invented.
This happens absolutely constantly on cough various websites around the internet. People who are always the smartest people in the room in their industries commenting on topics like pinsetting machines. Pinch hazards are unbelievably dangerous and kill or maim lots of people every year. Operator fatigue, poor design, and thousands of other factors obviously contribute. But they wouldn't know because they've never worked in those spaces.
"Just restricting the force" doesn't work because the force at pinch points will be huge in normal operation and the extra force to slice your finger off at a pinch point would be noise compared to all the other forces.
Where I work, we produce industrial machines that could rip you in half without a hiccup. As a result we (like all industries that use hazardous equipment) have a very strong lock out/tag out policy.
I remember in training they warned us that at customer sites, it's common for the customer's employees to be averse to LOTO because of the time and hassle involved, and they may try to pressure us to skip LOTO procedures. We are expressly prohibited from doing so, but the negligence is real.
You have to prevent people from going rogue, otherwise they will.
The machines were designed at a different time. I've been in the back of a few alleys as a kid and they seemed a few steps, but not that many, beyond the shops where all tools were driven by belts from the ceiling. For example power looms severely injured people in a time before they were designed with safety guards and that's just moving thread>
Terrible, terrible change. Maybe it's just my alley that cheaped out on it, but still not a good impression at all.
Maybe it was subjective, or just a different alley, but it felt worse for me.
This is his first league using stringed pins and he says everyone’s average is down. Pins that used to fall just don’t and it’s not as enjoyable. He said it’s his last year in a league. :-(
Edit: his old alley went out of business during the pandemic. The building was purchased by a cannabis dispensary (Massachusetts). A new alley opened up down the road (the only alley in town) and they only have string bowling.
What's notable is that string pinsetters have only recently been standardized (and that's AFAIK still an ongoing process), because they have been wildly inconsistent. USBC has a recent update here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDvb0VmlHDU
Ultimately, I much prefer free fall bowling, but if the choice is between "string bowling on a USBC certified pinsetter" and "no bowling", I'll choose the strings. It's not a completely different game (like Duckpin, 9-Pin, or Candlepin), and it's still good - but it's different.
Many lanes are $50-80/hr now. I've seen over $100/hr too. Many have jacked the price up and they're still struggling.
My league alley bumped it up to $6/game for league members. I don't mind that. But if you sell by the hour, you're going to get less food and alcohol purchases. If our league and the other weren't at that alley, on Saturdays they would have nobody there bowling from open at 10am until at least 2pm.
The pricing per hour makes sense when people are deliberately bowling slow and just hanging out. You don't want lanes tied up if they are paying per game and taking forever.
But the structures they have now are ridiculous and make no sense.
They'd do better if they paid attention to how hotels do yield management.
I haven't tried the strings yet, but the sounds of bowling are a big deal to me. Just walking into a bowling alley and hearing the sounds of pins being hit makes me feel good, and puts my in the right frame of mind. Without the crash, I feel like bowling would feel empty to me.
This reminds me so much of the nostalgia and conflict over Formula 1 engine sounds:
https://www.si.com/fannation/racing/f1briefings/news/f1-ceo-...
Player 3, you’re up next! Would you like to buy a pack of 4 Mega Magnets? Your ball will attract any pins it comes near.
Only 600 Gems! Special Offer today only!
The sexy way to implement this (horrible) idea is to have a smoke/fog curtain at the end of the lane, and project onto the fog. The ball could slide through silently, and then the synthetic image (and sound!) would be cued.
Maybe there's a big sheet of glass suspended at an angle around the last quarter of the lane. The ball rolls under the glass into darkness and is visually replaced seamlessly by the virtual ball shown on a screen hanging on the ceiling, facing away from the bowlers- a Pepper's Ghost effect.
The first issue with this of course is that it would only work from certain angles; the possibly larger issue is that you'd have people rolling bowling balls at a giant sheet of glass.
Here's an idea: instead of requiring the whole 60ft lane, just have a lane ~10 ft long with a trap at the end. Based on the measured spin, angle etc, you could project the trajectory down the virtual lane.
Use one of those head-tracking techs (Dimenco screens?)
This would allow you to have like 3x-4x the number of bowling lanes in the same building footprint.
The focus is golf, but they do have a bowling mode where you throw the ball and the camera picks it up and simulates it on the projector. It's not attempting to replace the bowling alley in town though.
"European bowling alleys have used string pinsetters for decades because they require less energy and maintenance. All you need is someone at the front counter to run back when the strings tangle.
"But Americans have long treated this technology as a gimmick, relegating it to arcade-style games in restaurants and bars. The bowling congress knew that conferring official status meant confronting a stigma."
Perhaps because, as I found out, the string method makes the game much less fun.
I first saw them in the late 90's at Uptown Alley which was located on two levels of an old movie palace.
They definitely tangled a lot when they first went in, but it seems like the technology here got better overtime.
perhaps the strings need to be shorter in 10-pin to prevent tangling, which has an effect on things.
- Set up all 10 pins reliably and in the same spots
- Lift remaining pins after the first throw and sweep away the ones knocked down, if any
- Load extra pins into a holding area to make re-racks faster
- Other things I'm not thinking of
I encourage you to view this 3d breakdown of how a pinsetter works on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Iod6uwUGM2E?si=rTGYSd6CGHp94etz
The traditional pinsetter machine can sweep away pins in one operation, then set up all the right pins in one more operation. A robot arm can presumably only grab one pin at a time. You probably need multiple robot arms, which adds to the cost.
Suppose you keep that holder, and then do this:
(1) After the ball comes through, take note of which pins are standing, then immediately sweep them ALL away into an area back behind.
(2) The holder, which already has 10 pins in it, lowers and releases 1-10 pins as appropriate.
(3) While the bowler is taking their next shot, the robot arm works on picking up pins from the back area and refilling the holder.
This way, the robot arm can work in parallel with the bowler taking their next shot. If the bowler is really fast, the robot might still not be able to keep up, but at least it doesn't have to do all its work super quick in a narrow window of time.
When I was working on trains, I was surprised how old fashioned everything was. It hadn't really changed in 100 years. But once you see what an absolute beating they take continuously in normal operation, and the high cost of taking a wagon out of service for any reason - let alone the cost of performing maintenance itself, you realize the value in big dumb machines that just keep on working even if they underperform by some less financially important metrics. There are high-tech trains of course, with modern wonders like electricity and even computers, but they're expensive and don't make sense in many applications.
A lot of "surely they could improve that"s end up meaning "surely they could spend more money on that".
I am certain they have not. The reason I'm certain of it is because the injury rate can be reduced to zero, without impacting the game, by just turning the equipment off before anyone goes near it.
On the other hand, sometimes a product really is behind the times. This is probably a relatively small, niche market. Most of your sales probably happen only when a new bowling alley is built.
Outsiders might not want to invest in trying to break into the market. It's expensive to create a new design and set up a factory. And then you have to convince buyers to buy from you, the upstart, instead of companies that have been selling pinsetters since the 1950s. And if you succeed, the reward might not be that large.
The established companies might have a perverse incentive against innovating. The machines seem to do the job but require a good amount of maintenance, so the manufacturers might get a nice, steady stream of income from replacement parts and/or service contracts. Even if they are interested in updating the design, it's probably a safer bet financially to make incremental improvements instead of a radical redesign. (Why rock the boat if you're making money?)
None of this means necessarily means that the traditional pinsetter isn't as good as it can get. I just think it could either way.
Now that I think of it, if a better/safer/cheaper (non-string) pinsetter is possible, ironically maybe the threat of string pinsetters could be what brings it about. If the traditional pinsetter manufacturers see their business threatened (for the first time in decades), maybe it will force their hands and they'll take a risk on a radical redesign.
Why not attach them to the bottom and have the setting machine underneath?
> Why not attach them to the bottom and have the setting machine underneath?
Just guess—i don't actually know
• Make holes in the lane right under the pins, where the pins are each sitting on a little two-sided door with a hole in it just wide enough for the string to go through to the bottom of the pin.
• Knocked-over pins pull on the string, which causes their door to open, the pin to get pulled down into the now-open hole, and the door to close after them.
• Once you've cleared all the pins, the doors all open up, the pins are pushed back up, and the doors close.
• Throw in an optical sensor that notices any pins that are out-of-place but not tipped after a bowl, and brute-force resets them by swallowing them and then spitting them back out. (Or, alternately, swallow all the pins, then spit back out the remaining pins, after every bowl.)
In a way, it's still a pin-setting machine. But it's more like ten little individual pin-setting machines, that can't interfere with one-another.
The pins' strings could still get tangled, though. So it's not a perfect solution.
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That being said, my own favored solution would just involve a regular pin-setter "sweeper", plus a robot arm behind the lane that does its re-setting using Computer Vision using top-down and side-on lane cameras.
In other words: have a robot do exactly the job that a human pin-setter did.
Robots don't exactly have great dexterity for this kind of thing, but you can make it easier on the robot by putting electromagnets under the lane at each pin position — and a bit of a light ferrous metal on the bottom of each pin — so that the pins can just snap into place when brought close enough to the target zone, rather than needing to be set down carefully and exactly. (This would have helped human pin-setters too!)
Are the strings at least standardized? Length and weight/thickness?
So they say less strikes and scores not that far off, but it's stupid. Players are getting phantom spares and probably some phantom strikes with the strings.
Perhaps the title should read "String pinsetters are upending American bowling" to ensure the international audience moves on to something they find more relevant.
And of course, you charge more because it's luxury bowling.
They got rid of all the pool tables, too :(
Then, to recover the bowled pins, use OpenCV or something to guide the wires to their latching points at the tops of the pins.
pick-up bowling groups used to be my favorite way to meet cool randos.