Whoooo man those are pretty simple issues. If you are worried about those you may be in the wrong business!!!

But in all seriousness, Metallica is one of the most reliable pinballs out there.

Hot glue those stupid bulb things, directly solder wires on the trough switch boards, and that's it.

I run like 40 pinballs, Metallica is probably my most reliable game...

I've had my snake switch come off a couple of times. other than that nothing big. Granted it only has 3000 plays on it.

My Metallica probably has 40,000+ plays.

It was on free play at a high tech company with 2000 employees for a full year(averaged 80 plays a day 5 days a week), and also at a pinbar I run for a few years.

It's probably one of the heaviest played mets around, and still looks damn near mint!

All stems need a lot of prep before routing. Once done they are fantastic.

You basically want to remove the trough connector, and solder each wire directly onto the solder pad of the board.

If you don't do this you will need to reseat your trough connectors every 2 weeks otherwise you will encounter the balls ending during play. I assume this is your problem?

No other boards need this. Just the trough.

Sadly no matter what you do the problem will never stop until you solder direct. It's a factory design flaw that goes until spike.

hope you got good money from that.

Pre spike sterns are very good quality. Everything went out the shitter with spike. It seems they may have a handle on the node boards now though, at least I hope so.

You can solder directly for the trough opto connectors, or you can switch the connectors from IDC to molex. I've had to do it on all of my Sterns. Been operating a Metallica for over a year and I'm not sure it has been out of service even once.

Switching to molex sounds like a great idea. Do you use trifircon pins? ryanwanger

Our games get played a ton, I do not have an issue with the trough boards coming undone if you spread the pins apart to provide some extra tension on the connector. I would not be soldiering directly to the board. What a hassle when you do have to replace them or sell the game. If anything, a little bit of hot glue would be fine.

Hot glue would work, just do that to hold it on there. Stern really needs to do something about the design. A simple clip would solve the problem.

The first game or two, I soldered the wires directly. Once I bought a few extra molex connectors, I found it faster/easier to swap out the connectors than soldering the wires directly.

Yes, Trifurcon pins pinballkyle

It was a while ago, but I bought them from Great Plains Electronics. You want the 0.156" size for both the connector and the pins. Not sure why I didn't realize this at first, but you can easily cut a larger connector to size. (Example, you have a 5 pin connector laying around, just snip off two of the slots and now you have a 3 pin connector!)