Algodoo

Way back in my younger days I worked for a company that installed juke boxes, pinball machines, and video games in taverns and bowling alleys. Every machine had a coin accepter (we called them "slug rejectors" because that was their main purpose). It was a full-time job keeping those mechanisms clean because they would fail mostly from sticky material (dried coke or beer) that entered either through the coin clot, or on the coins themselves, gumming things up. If a slug rejector looked like the one in this scene (rusty), it would go into the scrap heap!

Good demonstration of how they work!

These are an awful lot simpler than I ever thought

@Xray, did you ever dig out any coins with strings attached to them?

Oh sure, but that trick doesn't work in the newer mechanisms. They are very hard to trick now, not like the old days!

how does this seperate U.S. and Canadian coins?

The U.S. coin is slightly larger and heavier, and so the mechanism makes it take a different path.