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I have searched here as well as asked and it seems that this can be done.  Has anyone done this?  Are there any issues at all with vending reliability with different sized bottles?   
If they drop in and work 100% it will be very tempting to do so because I can get v63 bottle shelves for next to nothing in a junk machine on CL and we all know what complete 81 shelves go for.  Just curious.  Thanks.

      Both shelves and compressor fit perfectly in the 81.

Thank you!

Do the V63 shelves have the "tabs" that advance the bottles?

      No, 63 shelves do not have slots for the slider brackets.

Dumb question:  If the the 63 shelves both fit and function without the need of spring tension sliders, then why did Vendo design a shelf this way at all?

Thanks for the answer! I wondered the same thing myself about those tabs. We regularly vend out of a Vendo 81 and a couple of the tabs are stuck "open," to the far right. If they contributed to function, I'd pop the shelves out and lubricate them a bit so they worked, but the beer... ah, I mean soda, seems to slide into the bottle stack just the same as the ones that have the functional tabs. The tabs seem pretty useless to me but as long as they are available and are part of the original machine, I'll continue to put them in Vendo 81's.

My suspicion is that the went to solid bottle shelves to eliminate production cost, and there were less moving parts to have make and stock!

Of course this is only my opinion!

My guess too.  Over engineered to provide a high level of reliabilty.  Either way I will try (eventualy) to get a full set of original 81 shelves for my machine, but until then I will most likely use 63 shelves to keep my "poduction costs" down  :laugh:

I don't have any basis behind this theory, but I wonder if it also had to do with the large size bottles that came out later, more gravity!  Maybe the 6.5oz bottle didn't come down consistently enough, just an engineering theory...

My Theory is this:

Many of these early machines had casters on them, and the machines needed to be moved around and maybe this movement would cause the bottles to shift? and the slider tabs helped keep them In place?

Just a theory?