Just finished shopping out my Addams Family Pinball.
I pulled the playfield completely out as it does not pull forward to get to all the screws in the back.
So after a complete tear down and clean, I put all the parts back as well as my new bookcase stickers, thing box stickers and back panel sticker. (looks really good).
I put the playfield back in place and reconnected all the molex plugs in the backbox.
When I fired up the machine the "Thing Hand" was going up and down and never stopped.
I put the machine in test mode and the screen told me the "Thing up Opto" was not working.
Great, I thought, how did that manage to break?
So I raised the playfield and put the machine in Switch edge test mode. I removed the metal thing box under the playfield and tested the thing up and down optos with a credit card.
They both tested perfectly.
What?
So I started pulling on random switches with my fingers and some of them made no noise at all from the switch test mode.
I then spent most of the evening looking for the short in the matrix.

So here is part one of the humor here.

If you do a switch test with the playfield raised it blocks the DMD screen with the important info on it. Had I been looking at it, instead of just listening for beeps I would have noticed really fast, that every switch was one number off from what was listed in the manual.
Turns out I just had J205 plugged in with a pin missing so all its wires were on the wrong pins.
Doh!

Part two came when I hurriedly put J205 back on correctly then put the glass on.
I quickly fired up a game and it worked perfectly.
Ball one played great. But on ball 2 I heard a loud knocking sound and thought to myself, its way to early to have gotten a free game.
Turns out that in my haste to play a game on my newly cleaned machine, I had forgotten to put the metal box back in place under the Thing hand.
The sound was the ball falling to the bottom of the cabinet when Thing let go of it.
Another loud, Doh!!!

It was worth all the time it took.
However now that my ball drain coil has been cleaned, as well as the tracks the ball rides to the shooter lane, sometimes the third ball will keep bouncing back to the out hole off of the other two balls in the trough.
I tried putting more tension on the spring to stop the coil from firing it so hard but that did not work.
I finally had to put a couple of washers under the ball eject side to help lower the right side.
That has solved the problem 90% of the time.
Do I just need to buy a new ball drain trough or is there an easy fix for this problem that I am not thinking about?

I am positive there was not a wire going across when I took it apart. However that makes sense and would certainly solve the problem.
I will have to check my photos that I took early in the process. They will reveal if it ever existed.

Confirmed by my photos.
My Addams Family has never had this ball trough gate. At least since I have owned it.
I guess while the entire mech was dirty the ball just never rolled back.
But now with everything spic and span I guess I will be buying the little one way gate.
Learn something new every day.
Thanks Loyd.