Hi everyone. I'm new to Pinside and pinball in general and I thought I would start contributing to this forum instead of mooching off everyone else. I recently had some ball trough problems on my IJ. The balls were sticking in the ball trough ramp and I had to shake the machine to get them to advance forward. This also caused the optos to malfunction and launch balls randomly. Additionally, when the trough would shoot a ball into the launch lane, it would bounce back into the trough and repeat the cycle.
There were several reasons for this. First (as you can see in the picture below), indentations formed in the trough ramp where the balls rested over the years. This caused the balls to sit in the indentations and not roll forward. Second, I have raised my playfield to 6.7-6.8 to speed up the ball action because it was painfully slow. This incline caused the balls to rest more solidly in the indentations and also rest on the opto holes on the side of the ramp.
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I fixed all this by filing down the edges of the ramp smooth as well as the edges of the opto holes. I also placed a piece of drop dead foam on the roof of the trough to slow the ball down as it gets popped into the launch lane. Everything works great now.
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I had trouble finding very much info on this so I thought I'd post it here if anyone else was having this problem.