Funhouse!? Club... (Fans welcome)

Hey everyone! If all goes to plan, I will be doubling my pinball collection tomorrow and picking up a Funhouse! My other pin is a Sopranos, but Funhouse has always been my first love. I have a sneaking suspicion that I will be posting a lot of questions soon in this thread! I'm not very handy or known to fix things around the house, so buying a used, older machine has got me a bit nervous! But as the kids say nowadays, YOLO!

Well... you live close by. New friend...

Hey all you cool Funhouse owners and fans out there, I've got a question. First I'll give you a little backstory/bio.

I've loved pinball since I was a kid, but I never learned the ins and outs of machines, and I'm the least mechanically inclined person out there, like I'm dangerous to myself with a screwdriver bad. Not a good combo for a pinball owner, I know. My only other game was a brand new Stern because I figured it would be the best solution for someone like me. But, a few months ago I took the plunge I'd always wanted to and bought my childhood (well teenage) favorite, Funhouse. A scary proposition for someone like myself to buy a 30 year old machine. I figured if something goes wrong I'll have a baptism by fire, or worst case pay someone to help me. So far so good though as I have a bunch of plays on this machine and haven't had any issues.

So when giving me advice (which I hope at least one of you will do), please feel free to provide instructions as if you are talking to a child or someone who you just feel sorry for. And please forgive me that I don't know most of the nomenclature either.

Issue that did pop up tonight seems relatively minor, but it does affect gameplay. When the Steps are open, I shoot the ball up the ramp and rather than going towards the Steps left plunger area, it just goes down the regular old ramp towards the left flipper. Seems that metal blade that directs the ball down either side is only moving about halfway, not far enough to direct the ball towards the Steps. How do I fix this?

Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your advice. With a friend helping me, we checked out the underside of the play field over the weekend. Strangly and somehow the pin that goes into the solenoid that controls the diverter gate (hope that makes sense, again I'm not completely familiar with all of the terms for these things), along with the screws that hold the pin and the spring had gotten loose and fallen into the cabinet. Got that put back together and tightened everything.

When put back together the diverter defaults to the position where it's diverting towards the steps (seems backwards but it didn't seem there was another way with the position of the pin in the solenoid). When running the solenoid test the diverter is able to move in one direction but not in the other (it just makes a sound like it's trying to move in the other direction but doesn't do anything). This makes me think that the solenoid is good, but something else isn't working properly. Does that make sense? What else should I check, or what do you think might be wrong?

Thanks again.

Thank you so much for this. I have been crazy busy lately and hadn't had a chance to deal with this until recently. Your photo was very helpful as somehow the spring went missing from the assembly at some point and being the newb that I am didn't think that it was something that needed to be there. Ordered a new spring from Marco Specialties, installed it, and now it holds it in the correct position and everything is good again.