Linear flippers are crap.

Not only are replacement parts a fortune, they're heavy, and the nylon buttons wear out quickly even in home use. Now, if your goal is to have a flipper that will last in service an extremely long time with little to no maintenance, they are great. Operators loved them, and if the flipper angle got steeper and steeper they didn't care.... they still flipped.

The earlier design is better IMO because there's less moving mass, the parts are cheaper, and because of the lesser mass, the flipper flips faster. The compression spring issue I don't think is a very large concern in flipper strength, the effect the return springs have is more for a snappy return to rest vs. strength, unless you have those crazy stiff compression springs in there.

Other than doing the linear replacement different eras of machines are supposed to have different feeling flippers. Even manufacturer to manufacturer in the same era are going to feel different - it's part of the charm of some of the machines.

Truck Stop needs super flipper strength to make the ramps. The ramp on xenon is relatively shallow vs. the later games.

They sure do! The replacement parts cost on them suck even more.

Unfortunately all that does is make the hold winding stronger, not the power. I took apart a Bally flipper coil a while back to determine if they indeed were parallel wound, and they are. The thicker wired power stroke coil is inside the hold coil, so you could in theory remove some windings from that, but you'd have to remove and reinstall 4300 or windings of the smaller wire to do so.

There's 2 separate coils of wire in them. Look at the terminals.... there's 4 wires coming out of the coil. Disconnect the wires if you don't believe me from the terminals and you'll get infinite resistance between them. Even though that "made sense" to me when challenged on it in the past, when I unwound the coil manually, the entire hold coil came off and I had a very messy pile of thin wire in one pile, and the thicker power stroke wire still remaining on the bobbin.

Parallel wound just meaning that there's 2 wires instead of one single with a tap like a series coil has, not whatever BS that williams later patented when they were dragged into the future around 1988 or so.

Don't make me destroy another coil to prove it again!!

Of course, I could be wrong wouldn't be the first time

Yep, we are. Maybe it's not accurate for me to describe the bally coil as "parallel" winding, as the definition from Williams seems to indicate that they're not adding in the hold coil, they're substituting it? So the theory would be players that like to hold up the flippers a lot will not be heating up the thrust winding in this case - but on Bally coils you're adding in the hold winding to the thrust winding, so that would be described as 'serial' since it is. Now, that makes sense, so not accurate for me to call it a parallel using the williams definition. But it is accurate in that it's still 2 separate windings, which is really what I was trying to convey, unlike the williams series wound coils which I don't believe have the 4 wires, only 3.

So - what's to prevent someone from re-wiring a bally coil to behave like the williams' definition of parallel wound?

Nope, nothing other than Williams' patent/marketing hype I guess. People do seem to like to change WMS series wound coils to parallel though and they swear it makes a difference? I usually do it only because I don't feel like having several types of coils around and I usually convert the older 2 piece base flipper coils to the wpc/system 11 style.