I think you can loosen the screws on the guide and slightly adjust it to help out. I really hate it when the ball bounces and it goes over the sweet spot and you can’t make a critical shot.

I think you meant to say " so the ball does NOT bump into the flipper on the way down." You are taking about flipper hop.

I had a bad case of flipper hop on one of my pins. It had to be fixed.

you can see the problem.

IMG_1747 (resized).JPG

I drilled a hole in a piece of plastic to use as a guide hole for the ball guide. This allowed me to move my ball guide in the proper position. Once I had the plastic properly located I taped it down and removed the ball guide and drilled a new hole.

plactic template (resized).JPG

Here are 3 pics of both holes. I filled the old hole and job was done.

wire guide plugged (resized).png

All you need to do is remove the upper metal ball guide. Then get a piece of plastic, or something and drill a hole the size of the hold down screw. Then get a something heavy (a 2 by 4) to rest on your flipper and slide every thing into position and drill a new hole. If you are not moving very far you amy have to fill your old hole with some dowel rod before you can drill a new hole.

Don’t drill new holes. Your current holes are stripped out, or the lane guide is beat to hell from use.

Cliffy makes replacement lane guides that will fix this or fix the stripped out hole and push the lane up as you tighten back down.

Good call. I did not think about that.

For your big game though I’m not sure anything is better than what you did. I wonder how it got that far off on yours?

I'd try to get new lane guides, or make a plastic cut out that fits over the existing one to push the ball out. PAPA did this on their Flash Gordon. But to some extent this is sadly how it was designed. All the Ballys from that era have flipper hop.

Correct me if I am wrong but isn't this ball guide in two pieces? A lower pice is plastic that actually does the work and an upper metal piece that is for looks?

I'm guessing on this next part. I had a Bally Playboy that had a plastic guide up by the Grotto area that was very yellowed and broken. I am assuming it was made of PETG like the plastics. And you know those old plastics like to break and shrink. If these EBD plastic ball guides are made of PETG then it could be possible that they have shrunk in size over the years? Yes? And now these old Bally's have flipper hop issues due to shrinkage?

I would be for making replacements with some polycarbonate. That stuff is bullet proof. I replaced the broken one on my Playboy with one I made from poly.

I have broken my brain trying to figure out how it was that mis-located.