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Advance #11 (a.k.a. "Big Mouth")

Advance Machine Company, Chicago, IL, c. 1925, 16 ¹/₂". This is made of rolled steel and vends a handful of peanuts or candy for a penny. This is the sister machine to the Advance Model D gumball machine but is a bit less common.

This example was found in rural Wisconsin by a collector, who sold it to another collector who eventually sold it to me. The lid is unusual; it's made of cast iron instead of steel and it has a round knob on the front instead of the bent thick wire usually found on Advance Model D and Big Mouth mechanisms. For years this was the only example of an Advance Model D or #11 that I'd seen with a cast iron lid, but in 2016 I saw another one for sale at the Chicagoland show and that was a clue that this is correct. The round knob is common to later wall-mount "Advance" machines made by The Harmon Mfg. Co., which bought Advance and moved the company to Wichita, KS in the early 1960s, but I don't recall ever seeing a round knob on an Advance globe machine. The color is also unusual but it's an old repaint, so I can't consider that unusual from Advance's standpoint, just from the standpoint of a collector (me!) who likes the hammertone paint, the color, and the fact that it's different. Almost all Advance Big Mouths are painted red.

Given that it's been repainted, it's possible that the lid is from another model and isn't even an Advance lid, and that the original bent-wire handle was replaced with a Harmon knob in the late 1960s or 1970s and then the whole shebang was repainted, but I have a strong subjective impression that that's not the case. I can't give you strong objective evidence that it's not, but this is all-too-together for that to seem right to me.

I believe this example is 100% original except the paint, which was done by a vendor decades ago and looks great despite not being original.