Possible, probably. I have played a different title that I bought for refurbishing where someone had changed 2" flippers for 3". Hated it, couldn't change them back fast enough. While certainly scores were higher, it seriously felt like cheating, and just wasn't fun. So scores were higher, they were meaningless. If you want a 3" flipper game, please buy one to replace Gigi.

Depends on which screw you are talking about.
Under the plastic is a flipper base and shaft. It is screwed under the flipper. It is steel. This base and shaft is not interchangable with a 3" flipper bat.
I have not owned a game with 2" flippers so i cannot answer if you can simply loosen the set screw into the shaft and replace a 3" flipper bat and base where the 2" one is.
Go to the em parts thead and ask there.
If you do change it, keep the old bats to put back in if you sell it. Pinheads can be kind of fussy.
Cliff

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-em-seeking-parts-thread

You should be able to use a new 'thin shoe and shaft' and 3" bat plastic from PBR (http://www.pbresource.com/flippers.html#3in) but I doubt it's gonna play good

Changing the size of the flipper is a 100% reversible mod, so I say go for it if that's really what you want to do. If you find that you don't like it, you can always change it back.

To do this mod correctly, as zacaj mentioned, on each flipper you will need to remove the shoe-and-shaft assembly (with the 2" shoe) and replace with a shoe-and-shaft assembly that has a 3" shoe. And, as PinballAir mentioned, be sure to save all old parts and, ideally, store them in the machine.

The shoe-and-shaft assembly is removed by loosening two set-screws on the flipper crank located under the PF, and pulling the flipper bat and shaft out from the top of the PF. In theory that's easy to do, but in the real world you can run into a couple of complications. First, the set-screws may be difficult to get loose, and second, burrs on the shaft created by the set-screws cinching onto the shaft can make it difficult to extract the shaft from the plastic bushing.

When you remove the original shaft and shoes, be sure they are marked as to which one is the left flipper and which one is the right flipper. That way, if you ever want to re-install them, the existing set-screw indentations in each shaft will help to get the shaft back to the original factory position. If you keep the plastic flipper bats attached to their respective shoe-and-shaft assemblies, then you'll know which flipper goes where because of the lettering on top of the bat.

- TimMe

One thing to remember is that these games are designed by engineers and they calculate for the flippers that will go on them; ie-2" flippers are not as strong as 3" and you may end up breaking something with a good 3" flipper power shot. BUT if the game is driving you mad, it's still yours to modify and posts 6&7 give good advice on how to do so.

currieddog makes an excellent point. In the event that your 3" flippers seem too strong - that is, if you feel like your power shots might break the PF plastics - you can reduce the overall power of the flipper by adjusting the EOS switch to open sooner during the flipper stroke.

Can also usually reduce the effective power of the flipper by moving the return spring anchor point by 120 degrees to windup the return spring just slightly to have more tension. However, that may also make the flipper "seem" snappier and you might or might not like the feel.

Why not?

At one time I found the flippers on my Judge Dredd to be too long so I replaced them with 2 inch bats. The metal ones that Williams used in the 60s.

One thing to consider is with set screws you will want to use the kind of shaft that has notches in the side to accept them, not the straight shaft or it can be a bear trying to remove them without cutting them out.

DO IT.
It is your game.
Bob Ross used to say"its your world"
Go ahead and put some happy flippers on there

Do yourself a favor and measure the flipper gap before you swap flippers. If it’s a three inch gap now it will be about one inch after the swap. Barely big enough for the ball (1 & 1/16”).
Lightning flippers are an eighth inch shorter. I still don’t think it would be fun for more than a couple minutes but it’s your game.

The flipper mech under the playfield for Gigi is the exact same as when they went to 3" flippers. So it won't hurt the mechanicals of the game.

As others have said, you would need to change the flipper shoe/shaft also.

What has been considered before by a friend of mine was a bat cover that is a little longer. He engineered the file that could be printed on a 3D printer and made 2" flipper bats 1/8" longer. In this instance they are screw off the old and screw on the new. Not sure if he has made the file public.

But looking at the photo in the post above, assuming that is your game, you have already effectively lengthened the flippers, and closed the gap a little, by adding the second ring on each flipper.

Lastly, my advice is keep them original and adjust the game setup a bit if it is too difficult. You can adjust the playfield slope. Sometimes steeper makes it easier - keeps the ball from hitting the outlanes so much. There are also liberal post settings that can make the game play more forgiving.

Good luck.

Mike, actually that is factory. You can see the double-ringing of the flipper bats in the flyer pics of many Gottlieb games into the mid-1960s, all of which had 2" flippers, of course.

The explanation I heard at one of the Pinball Expos in Chicago was that this was done to compensate for the change to a smaller pinball size. Around 1950 or so, the pinball companies started using 1-1/16" balls in their games, replacing the 1-1/8" balls that had been in use before that. This was done to make the game play faster.

The plastic bats that were used on the first flippers were originally designed to be lane guides, and you can see them used for that purpose on many pre-flipper games after 1945. They are even used for lane guides on some flipper games, such as Gottlieb's Universe (1959). When these lane guides were first designed, the rubber ring groove was set to be right at the horizontal centerline of a 1-1/8" ball when the guide was screwed down directly onto the playboard. However, when that guide was raised up slightly on a shoe and shaft so it could operate as a flipper bat, and the ball size was reduced to 1-1/16", the ring on the guide (now a bat) was meeting the ball too far above the ball's centerline. So a second ring was added below the first ring to compensate for this problem.

While that makes a good story, it doesn't really explain why Gottlieb would continue to do such a hack for so many years. It may be that the story is bogus, or it may be that trying to move the ring groove down to the lower part of the bat didn't work out well. And, it may just be that the existing flipper bat was working out fine as it was, and so there was no compelling reason to mess with it.

- TimMe