The main issue I had with ball launching on my Baywatch seemed to be a basic design flaw.

The "high rise" mounted shooter coil bracket has the shooter lane switch mounted to the coil bracket. I had Very regular issues with this switch failing. Sometimes from broken a wire, other times the switch simply giving out. Best stretch I got out of a repair was a month at best.

Eventually I figured that the crazy vibes associated with this shocking flexible bracket were probably the root cause, so I mounted the switch on a bracket to the playfield instead, the way any smart engineering design would have it. Haven't had a shooter switch failure in almost 2 years now, around 1000 plays.

Also I just probly jinxed the good run by saying it!

These are a couple of pics of the modification...

Baywatch Shooter 1 (resized).jpg

Baywatch Shooter 2 (resized).png

Same experience as swinks re skill shot, after game was properly serviced everything worked great. Although I found that if the coil power was set to hard that the ball would make it to the top gate before it would open, disallowing the second or third skill shot option almost every time. Coil power normal, all works fine.