no to legs and siderails...

I always put the legs on the ground.

Bum dum tiss.

Why, if they're isolated by wood?

What if they're not long enough to reach?

Seriously though...legs are often grounded, either with an actual screwed-in lug, or with mesh grounding tape. For example:

grounded leg

No

not on EM's they aint!

Not sure what your point is. Most (all?) EMs didn't have a ground wire to start with. So...duh?

The question was, when adding grounding, where to put it. If you (or anyone else) is going to assert that one should not ground the legs, even though it's common practice on machines that were originally manufactured with grounding, you ought to at least give some rational basis for the claim.

Merely saying "no" without any other context, or even pointing to the lack of grounded legs on machines that weren't grounded in the first place, just doesn't cut it.

Actually the OP's question was: "Is it necessary to ground legs?"
To which I concur with Pinhead52 and newmantjn ... No

I find it inane to take the title of the post so literally. My paraphrasing of the actual post the author of the thread made is accurate.

It's not necessary to ground any part of a pin that was originally manufactured without a ground. So obviously it's also not necessary to ground the legs. Replies restating that obvious fact are pointless. The OP's message makes it clear they are looking for a more nuanced and informative response.

There are several people apparently claiming first-hand knowledge on the topic, but for some reason they refuse to share any of the factual basis for their answers, instead posting just "no" without any explanation to justify the response. I find that sort of reply useless; you all may be the most brilliant people on the planet, but if I were the OP, I still wouldn't trust you well enough to take action on such a thin reply.

Silly question, but how do you ground everything else if they are not connected to the ground. I know there is a ground wire, but I’d rather charge go through the legs than thru me which is why the ground braid connects to the legs.

Any voltage/current leak finding it's way into the ground braid would not actually travel through the legs in order to find a path to ground, unless perhaps if the game is standing on a concrete or earthern floor. It would likely travel through the ground wire of the power cord, and into the receptacle, provided it is properly grounded. A GFCI outlet would trip and cut power to the game as well. You would be safe from a shock even if the legs were not grounded. The current wouldn't travel through your legs to get to ground, unless maybe if you were standing barefoot in a puddle!

The fact that you find it inane is irrelevant, so paraphrase away!

And sorry you find some of the replies useless since they aren't backed up by a dissertation on electrical grounding principles. If you ask someone "Is it ok if I stick my finger in this light socket" and they just tell you "No, dumb ass", do you go ahead and do it? I mean, it's such a thin reply, how can you trust it???

The op has been here 8 years and has 13 games, sounds to me like he's just shooting the shit and making conversation, not writing a technical manual. And apparently he WASN'T looking for a more nuanced, informative response since he hasn't chimed back in. Nice of you to look out for him though. I feel better knowing someone that's been here less than a year will come to the rescue if these other old-timer assholes don't answer questions to your satisfaction.

No

I think you've answered your own question. I'm with you in thinking the legs on modern games are grounded just for regulatory compliance.
The worst shock I ever got from a pinball machine was when I touched the grounded leg of a game (reaching down for my beer), while having my other hand on the lockdown bar of an adjacent game which obviously had a hot lead in contact with a metal part of the game (likely the coin door). Pretty bad jolt, and if the leg of the other game wasn't grounded, I wouldn't have gotten zapped. Of course it alerted me to the fact that there was a problem!

Question for you JR. When you received this shock, did the breaker trip?

Breaker? Where? It was in a friend's basement gameroom.
As far as I remember, nothing tripped.

Grumpy old men meet huffiness. Pretty cool.

Breakers are usually 15A or 20A in the US. A deadly shock can happen around 0.03A or 0.06A (don't remember the exact number). So the breaker won't trip unless it's a GFI.

This is exactly why I don't ground my machines.

Breakers weren't designed to protect people from getting shocked. They protect from over amperage and a dead short but when you are between the path to ground, it is not a dead short. Your body provides resistance. The breaker doesn't trip

I have a lot of games if I tried to ground them all, sooner or later I would miss one or procrastinate grounding it, or miss a connection point somewhere . Then I would create the most dangerous condition, One grounded, one un-grounded.

The problem is people keep doing this to make their machines "safer". But in some situations they have actually made them less safe. The only serious shocks I've ever heard of were in situations just like the one JR described. An un-grounded machine beside a grounded machine. Which is more dangerous than if both machines were left un-grounded.

So ground them if you want, but make sure you ground every single machine in the room.

What I do, can best be describe as, sort of, double insulating. A large majority of my mostly early 70's machines do not have line voltage at the door. Those that do, I take extra precautions to insulate. I replace and add extra fish paper and I line the underside of the door switches with a thin piece of plastic to insulate everything from the metal. So a loose wire or bent switch can't come into contact with any metal. Also, I put those little rubber boots over the toggle switch on all my games, And I use GFCI outlets.

I think grounding is providing people with a false sense of security. I rather do things to avoid a shock in the first place than to rely on breaker to protect me, because it won't.

I figure if you are adding a ground anyway, you may as well ground the legs as well. It's a bit more material, but then it is the same as they started doing from the factory, and just a complete job.

Although the legs are somewhat isolated, they still have a metal receiver and bolts going from inside the cab to the outside. Hypothetically, say the prop bar or some other metal piece came loose and wedged against the receiver, or some other situation who knows what, there is a risk.

Since giving myself a good jolt between a old em from the lockbar and a grounded Ss machine, I've gone out of my way to properly and fully ground machines... I appreciate the risk is minimal, but it is a risk.. Just seems like the right thing to do to mitigate risks where possible.

There are new style breakers available now & have been for a long time . It is now law in Australia that these breakers be installed when work has been done on a circuit without one.
Residual current devices.
They sense milliamps differences & trip faster than a heartbeat.
I just happen to have one handy as I am in the process of re wiring my house

Ground your machines . You do not want to be the path to ground if there is a fault

OP. Run the braid under your leg brackets to ground your legs. It will not kill you to do that. It may if you dont. (imagine a LIVE wire dropping on to the leg bolt) It is possible.

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This is why I said, if you ground your machines, make sure you ground them all. If you forget to do one and you touch it and the grounded one at the same time, YOU will be the path to ground.

I doubt if many people in the US have those type of breakers. Most US homes will have either standard breakers, GFCI breakers or AFCI breakers, depending on the age of the house or location of the wiring. The only ones I would trust for personal protection are GFCI's. Almost all new circuits are required to have AFCI's but they are mainly for fire protection.

Good, since those are the only ones you can trust. The other protections breakers offer -- AFCI and overload protection -- don't do anything to protect against electrocution. They are just fire prevention.

But it's trivial to install a GFCI outlet if one is not already present. Code only requires GFCI in locations like unfinished spaces or wet areas (bathroom, kitchen, garage, unfinished basement, etc.) so you're right they are often not present, at least in US homes (standards are different elsewhere in the world and GFCI, er...sorry, "residual current" breakers are more prevalent). But there's no code that says you can't have one if you want. It's not even that hard to swap the breaker on the circuit and protect all the outlets at once, if one is so inclined.

If one is concerned enough about electrical safety to go adding grounded cords to the pins, they might as well do the job 100%.

One last point to be made here is make sure your home is properly grounded. To some this may seem silly but if you live in an older home (like I do) the electrical system may have a substandard ground system. Make sure you have a ground rod pounded outside the house and it is attached to the breaker box and the plumbing. This can also prevent lightning damage when a lightning strike tries to jump on the your electrical system. This happens quite often here in Colorado since we are at high altitude. Do not be so trusting with breakers of any kind. All it takes is one SNAFOO and the whole system can be compromised. You cannot imagine the fallout over a little one sticking his tongue out and touching the leg of a machine and being seriously shocked.

I have GFCI receptacles. One provides protection to all outlets downstream on the same branch. So you can get similar protection from properly placed GFCI outlets as you do from GFCI breakers.

I would ground legs and anything else metal that people can touch on the outside of the game. If a failure happens inside the game and an energized part comes in contact with the leg plate someone could get hurt.
Old pinballs didn't need to pass UL protocols but new games do.

Is this just a GFI, or is this something new?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residual-current_device

Legs really don't really need to be grounded, unless "an energized part comes in contact with the leg plate"

Unless these parts are bouncing around the cabinet, no ground needed. Lots of Euro games from the 80's are not legs grounded with no issues. Here in the US, everything was grounded out of insurance risk concerns.