I've noticed on some games I've owned that when the ball goes from the inlane to the flipper, it sort of hops over the space instead of flowing smoothly on to the flipper. This seems to be most prevalent on older games such as System 11s. It is currently happening on my Pinbot, and I seem to recall the same thing with my SoF. Is this just something that is common to all games from this era, or does it mean that something needs to be adjusted? Short of physically moving the ball guide closer to the flipper, I can't think of any way to fix the issue.

But how can one adjust the flipper height? It has to go into the bushing, and there isn't any play with where the bushing can be mounted.

Very interesting. I had no idea Cliffy was working on this.

I'm glad you resurrected this old thread of mine, as it made me realize that I never followed up with how I solved the problem. It turned out that the original lane guides on my Pinbot were indeed worn from the balls smashing into them over the years. I replaced both of them with new ones from Cliffy, and no more hop.

I still own the game, by the way, and it's still one of my favorites.