WMS Bluebird Reel Strip Install

I don’t exactly remember the reason why but we had a new Bluebird that needed the five reel strips to be installed. OK, no problem. My estimated time was about ten minutes. One game totaling five reels, boy was I ever wrong. When I looked into the box, to my surprise there was reel encoder film for each reel. At the time I didn’t think much about it, only the reel strips should need to be installed. The reel encoder film should already be on the game, right? Not quite. It took me a few minutes to figure out how the unit went onto the reel basket, now how does it attach? Simply by opening up a game next door that had reels and reel strips already installed it was quite obvious that small plastic rivets were used. My problem now, where are the rivets to secure the reel encoder in place? I looked in the game, in the box, double checked both, and didn’t see any anywhere. Now what? Ask my manager to order twelve so we had two spares? The games were scheduled to be installed the following week. What type of fastener could be used? An EPROM tube plastic pin looked similar, maybe it would do the trick. (The small plastic pin that is at the end of a chip tube that keeps the chips from falling out, a type of plastic rivet?) When I tried it, no doubt the pin was too large. It seems like I have seen a small plastic type rivet used in slot machines somewhere before...could it be...do we even have any in stock? What I am thinking of is the small rivets or pins that are used on a JCM DBV bill acceptor head to hold down the steel plate. The plate needs to be removed when adjusting voltages and fine tuning a DBV. Were the parts identical? It didn’t take long and I found a bunch of them. When I grabbed one and tried it in the reel assembly, it worked perfectly. Now I could finish my task at hand. My ten minute job ended up taking around two hours. Since I was the only tech on duty at the time, I had to grab floor calls too. It took some time and thought but my task was completed.