I have a Bally Eight Ball. I have always had trouble with the left outlane kicker being erratic or weak. The coil is strong, the coil sleeve is new. If I roll a ball down it kicks back nicely most of the time. When I look at videos the ball goes flying back up into the pop bumpers where mine might do that 1% of the time. Sometimes the ball gets kicked, just slows down then carries on down to the drain. The coil is the right one. Adjustment is only fiddling with the outlane switch spacing.

Hoping someone else has fought with this before.

Somehow I was not being alerted to replies to my own thread!

It looks like the tip of the kicker is nicely rounded not worn, and it seems to kick straight but I will look at that again. I made some adjustments to the switch wire form to adjust where the ball would trigger the kicker in addition to adjusting the switch gap. I was actually thinking of removing some turns off the coil to increase the kick force.

Finally got a chance to really look at the machine. It turns out the kicker was mounted a little to the left of center of the ball. If the ball was spinning clockwise when it hit the kicker it would just kill all the energy and the ball would halt then fall down the outlane. I opened up the bracket holes a little and slid the mechanism right. The kicker works a lot better now.