This thread is old but I thought I might try and help. The Magnet Core gets fairly malformed over many plays and you can feel the change with your finger. Replacing it costs about $10 and 10 minutes. But the likely solution to the head not throwing the ball is a setting. If you had the machine set to home play or "easy," it would have had a couple feature settings that would change with a factory reset. The R-I-P-L-E-Y-S setting in the feature menu (#6 in the Feature adjustments) is likely the problem. If you set it to default, which is "no letters," the ball will not kick back into the bonus lanes because the head has not been activated which happens at the second Ripley letter. So, if you want it to kick backward initially, simply change the number of starting RIPLEY letters to 2 or more and that will make the ball kick backwards. The default setting changes the game dynamic a lot. It makes the player build up the RIPLEY letters to open a lot of features and with the other distracting routes and objectives, you may lose focus of those letters.