That's a mod to reduce power to the feature lamps. There was a discussion about it 6-8 months ago. I can't quite remember the reason for the mod but it reduces the feature lamp voltage so might have been implemented to extend the life of the lamps/connectors or something.

Measure the feature lamp voltage and decide if your game needs it.

Is BR1 faulty?
What AC voltage were you reading going into BR1?

I had a rectifier board recently that had this top side mod done exactly the same as yours. There was also a trace cut on the bottom of my board going to BR1 - check yours, it should be obvious. I restored the rectifier board back to original.

To answer the question to your thread title.....it is my opinion that a fix can be defined as something that actually causes the machine to work fully where as a hack only gets the machine to work partially but fully excepts money. That's how I see it.

So if your machine accepts a quarter but a flipper is only partially working then you got a hack. If your game accepts a quarter and plays great you're dealing with a solid fix.

I just opened a Vector the first time and found the same situation. Thanks for the thread. I now know what I’m looking at.

BF5420A5-3043-49EB-80C3-D2F01E425024 (resized).jpeg

i think this is a different hack then the other one the original post showed. The OP picture shows an extra bridge installed to get the voltage drop across the diodes in the bridge to lower the feature lamp voltage. This one is remotely mounting a bridge rectifier probably because they had a lug terminal bridge instead of wire.

These bally games with the transformer in the cabinet can send pretty high voltage to the lamps, often over 7v which reduces the life of the lamps. It seems like there was a distributor that did that "mod" to every game as there is lots of boards out there with the same mod as the original poster.

Back in the day, many operators were complaining about the switched illumination bulbs (555) burning out very quickly on 8 Ball Deluxe, Vector, and Mr & Mrs Pacman pinball machines. Bally either sent out a service bulletin or told distributors to perform this mod (I don't remember which because it was so long ago). We had several machines with this mod already installed. Some power transformers were outputting too high of voltage for the switched illumination circuit.

What it is, you cut the DC output trace from the switched illumination bridge rectifier. Then insert into the circuit in series another 25 amp or 35 amp bridge rectifier with the wires connected to the AC input terminals of the new bridge rectifier. This makes the new rectifier act like a giant high wattage resistor. This drops the output voltage of the original switched illumination bridge rectifier by about a volt.

Of course this assumes you have already configured the AC power input jumper plug to the power transformer to 120 or 125 volts from the factory setting of 115 volts.

This is where I purchased my 25amp Bridge Rectifier - Amazon $5.36 (Not including shipping)

NTE Electronics NTE5322 Full Wave Single Phase Bridge Rectifier with Quick Connect Leads, 25 Amps, 200V Maximum Recurrent Peak Reverse Voltage

Sold by: Amazon.com Services, Inc

your hack is different. That is just someone who didn't want to have to take apart the sandwich board and decided to just piggyback a BR on the one that's already there. Problem is, is that the original BR is probably still there and a direct short would bypass the wire one. Unless they got in there and cut it off.

That makes this a factory-approved hack.

Thank you all for the information. I’m two years into the hobby and these forums have been a great help for my multitude of questions.