Thanks to Diddy's Pinball Mods tdiddy . Added their Tesla Strike towers. Super cool and pretty simple mod to install. Finally gave me a reason to adjust the wire ramp coming out of the building. It was catching on the tower as it went down every time. Now it doesn't.

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I just installed the Pinball Life shaker. Instead of causing vibration, the way my other shakers do, I get a very loud machine gun rat-a-tat-tat effect. You're very conscious of something operating inside the cabinet vs. the entire machine shaking, as is intended. Any thoughts will be appreciated.

You can adjust the arms on it to lessen the shaking intensity. Just loosen the weight on one side and rotate it 15 degrees or so, then tighten it and see if that helps. The PBL shakers I have have all been smooth.

Thanks. I'll try it out.

Check and see if you have a threaded rod across the top of the shaker bracket (my last PL shaker had one, but some don't).

If so tighten it up a little, that's always solved the problem for me. I had a Monster Bash that was doing that, no rod to hold that bracket together, so I drilled it out and diy'd it. Worked great, but it was a pain in the butt with my consumer grade drill and bits.

As above ^^ sounds like it isn't fastened down solidly. I'd make sure each of the 4 screws are screwed down tight...and make sure one of the fasteners on the underside of the cabinet didn't accidentally fall out to keep one of the screws from adequately tightening.

Thanks to all. In good shape with the shaker now.

What was the problem?

I hope this doesn't land me in "rainbow puke" territory, but I threw an RGB LED strip as a backboard light...

Being unthrilled with my choice of green for trough lighting (I always felt like Mothra looked like she was going to throw up), I ran some wires into the cab and tied three small LED strips into the line and mounted them in the trough. Now the trough lighting changes with the backboard light.

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Keeps it interesting. And I'm a bad enough player that I spend plenty of time watching pinballs go down the drain, so now at least I'll be entertained while doing do.

... And btw, with thanks to wtatumjr for the inspiration, I added some cows to the rooftop barbecue. NOW it's a party.

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(Cows are HO scale, while the folks are N scale. Truth is I didn't realize the cows were off scale until after I stood back and took a good look, but I figure these can be Kaiju cows.)

Broke a billion tonight! 1.7 great game! Made it pretty far in. Love the game!

I'm noticing I have to clean and wax my LE MUCH more often than my other games. If I don't it every 15-20 games or so, I start getting the drains from everywhere, less flipper juice,etc. Wondering if others are experiencing this.

How chewed up are your balls?

The third physical button on my service menu stopped working. How would I fix this and is there a different way to turn up the volume any other way (since it's how at zero)?

Check the connector on the coin door interface board inside left side of the cabinet. It's CN10, highlighted in the below picture.

Inspect the area below the buttons for a broken wire.

You also might want to check CN12, which is the service switch output to the CPU board. It could have come loose, too.

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If none of those are the problem, on CN10 you can short the pins together to force a switch registration, but the pins are small so it might be difficult. Basically one end of the jumper wire to pin 6 (GND) and then the other end to either pin 1 (Back), 2 (Down), 3 (Up), or 4 (Select) to trigger it manually when you connect any of those 4 to pin 6.

Didn't see any broken or loose wires but pushed on them and now it's working again. Thank you!

If you have the shaker motor that can often shake things like this loose, so if it's an intermittent connection, it may shake loose again. At least you know what to look at now.

Right. I don't, but I also recently moved the machine so maybe they or just accumulated nudging led to it

As a follow up, are the physical buttons the only way to adjust the volume? I was flipping through menus thinking there might be another option but didn't find one.

Stock, no. But you can add external physical controls by handing over more money.

https://www.pinballlife.com/stern-spike-2-headphone-jack-assembly.html

There also a remote knob by itself:

https://pu-parts.com/external-volume-control-system-spike

My DP and Star Wars both have buttons out in the coin door recently, no disconnected wires and the connectors are seated properly. On DP it’s vol up and SW it’s vol down…makes it a pain in the ass to go through the menu.

In addition to their headphone kits with 3xternal volume control, Pinnovators has a kit (the Mech-MAC) that repurposes the two coin reject buttons to become the volume up and volume down controls. Maybe not good for location games but ok for home use.

https://pinnovators.myshopify.com/collections/all/products/mech-mac

The service buttons on recent Stern games have been super mushy. I’m going to replace mine.

Post #6052.

Take the plastic cover off and see if everything seems to be working right in test. The only things that should be moving are the weights on either side. The base in the middle shouldn’t move at all. Try and pinpoint what on the mech is making the noise.

Anyone have the Mezel mods Maser Cannon installed? Curious how much it darkens things since it replaces the spot. I love the way it looks but not sure I want to sacrifice illuminating PF for installing the cannon. thanks in advance.

I thought it uses the spotlight ....basically its an extention?

I think people wanted to know what you did to resolve your issues with the shaker

Posts 6055 and 6056.

from what I can see, it does have an LED in it but it’s not an actual spot light and is a blue tip that doesn’t appear to emit much illuminating light, which is my concern.

Wow you had to do all of that to fix it

today in, "well, that's a first", I started godzilla multiball, immediately launched a ball up the left ramp, and it landed on the roof, and stayed there until multiball ended, and the game had to do ball search.

Damn that sucks....I thought they were designing it to just clip on to the spotlight that's there already

Never, EVER should you have wax every 15-20 games, that's a joke. Think about this.... your flippers are weak because your not waxing enough.....?

I'm late to the watermelon party but if anyone wants to see an LE come out of the box and be setup with my usual mods (Scorbit, titans, silent PSU fan, super bands, real knocker etc) and a fresh coat of wax. Tune in to TWITCH.TV/DRI374. Starts at 11am PST and I should have the ready by 3pm'ish for gameplay. I did not receive my Pin Monk fan kit in time so we'll see how long the game will be playable but I plan to play up to 6pm.

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I have it and I didn’t notice any major difference with it out. Great mod.

Exactly! That’s like waxing your car twice a day ever day.

You have to remove the spotlight in order to add it unfortunately. Great mod and glad I got it.

My youngest kid hasn't been particularly interested in pinball, but she is enjoying Godzilla. She actually asked me to turn it on so she could play while I was doing something else in the basement. I don't think she's ever done that before.

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That’s awesome!

Cherry red service button line?

Doing some DIY sound upgrades. I'd like to go through some testing and kind of show pro's and cons of different stages. of upgrades using stuff other than the usual subjects(Kenwoods and Pyles etc.)

First step - Just swap out back box speakers with a quality set of 4" speakers. Definitely the easiest and cheapest route.

These Kickers are great little speakers, the tweeters do not protrude and are a direct bolt in without any adapters needed. $65 a pair roughly and a big improvement in quality over stock.

Pro's - much improved sound accross the board. With a big standout improvement accross the higher ranges. Yes it is true you can hear things in the audio tracks that did not stand out before. Definitely capable of taking all the Stern amp has to offer before crackling and popping etc. Louder, clearer, brighter. But not Rocking..

Con's - There isn't much mid bass to be had. It's not a speaker quality thing - it's a size thing, and how the back box makes a pretty poor enclosure. Trying to balance the new found mid range with the stock sub woofer took some time. At lower volumes a nice balance could be found. However; at higher volumes the Kickers just walked away from the stock subwoofer. Another problem - was with the soundtracks on Godzilla. Finding a balance that worked accross all of the soundtracks was difficult. But this is not the speakers fault.

Overall - a good, cheap, and relatively quick mod to improve sound quality overall. However it is better suited to lower lower(normal?) volumes.

Next step, upgrade to a bigger 5.25" see if we can take some balancing load off the stock woofer.
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For search purposes, these are the Kicker 46CSC44 speakers. I had also been looking at them. Thanks for the review.

I was putting my colored plastic protectors and Titans on my GZ Pro and noticed this sticker with the playfield out. I know Spectre was the code name, but it seems strange to have it on production run? Does everyone have one? Pretty cool regardless.

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Ahh, bummer... there's gotta be a better dome light replacement for each GZ dome light. I was hoping they'd keep the flasher and just change the spot the flasher emitted the light from no?

Yes. They have those lsbels on all playfields, my JP prem says Jaws LE since the codename was Jaws and prem/LE have same pf design. And now my GZ has Spectre LE.... best one I've seen was the walking dead "dinner time" LOL!

Yep - that's the one. I'll make sure to put part numbers in next time, as that's a good idea.

FYI - For testing I ran just the back box speakers by themselves and tuned the with the EQ until they sounded as good as they could running the media on GZ. This gave a good baseline and reference compared to the stock speakers. I then tried working in the subwoofer to get everything balanced and sounding good together accross different volumes.

Haha awesome. Thanks for the info!

If at least one of your +/- buttons is working you can navigate to UTIL->VOL and then use the Start & Flipper Buttons to adjust the volume there.

Any chance you could take a pic of what it looks like from players view? Trying to figure out if I want it. Only photos I have seen were close up.