I often learn the best from my own mistakes. And, I find there are also a lot of lessons to be learned from the mistakes of others. I thought it would be fun to have a thread about mistakes people have made and lessons they learned from them. I hope a lot of you will contribute.
Here are a few mistakes I've made and the resulting lessons:
1. I once failed to realized that I had pulled my playfield out all the way when it was sitting on the service rails. I gave it one more yank, thinking I had to lift it over the usual bump, and the whole thing fell into the cabinet. Luckily, nothing was broken, but my heart nearly stopped. I've learned to always double check the position before I move it again.
2. Having successfully used a magic eraser to clean up some glue spots on my Special Force, I tried to clean some dirt with it in a different section and rubbed away some of the paint by accident. I learned to be very careful with a magic eraser, to read Vid's guide more closely, and to know that what works in one area will not always work in another.
3. I was trying to diagnose some weird behavior with my switch matrix where one switch was causing multiple switches in the same column to fire. It took several weeks and many pinsiders help before I realized that I was creating a short to ground with my own body by touching the metal rivet on the stand up target while leaning on the metal cabinet rail. I learned a lot about switch matrices from that whole experience and realized that sometimes you create problems that aren't really there.