Hi there, I have an identical problem on my two early Bally machines.

Neither will tilt, even holding the tilt bob or the tilt bob rod against the lower tilt bob "ring".

However, it will tilt 100% of the time very easily if I am touching any of the grounded metal surfaces on the cabinet (e.g. side rail, lock down bar etc). i.e. It tilts if I move the tilt bob over with one hand and touch the side rails with the other).

Being the genius I am, I thought "this must be a grounding issue" and then ran a jumper from the cabinet ground to the tilt bob, but that caused a small spark and I think a game reset (this was a while ago).

I don't know what to make of this. Given I have the same behavior on two games, I thought this might be common enough I could find a fix for this online, but no luck so far.

Thank you for reading, and any help will be appreciated!

Thank you for the comments, I will investigate a bit further tonight and see what I can come up with.

I have not tested the playfield slam tilt switches. I will also double check to see how many switches remain closed on Flash Gordon (I think at least one switch is supposed to remain closed on that game due to how the single drop works).

I have had these games for a while; Paragon for ~8 years and Flash Gordon for ~4 years, but they were both the equivalent of "Barn Finds" and needed a lot of work by me to get them in good playable shape.

This tilt issue is really the only issue left to sort out, aside from classic flaky bally bulbs.

Cool. I will give the capacitor a look / replacement.

I was not aware of this! Thank you. Hopefully the capacitors sort this out.

I will report back maybe tonight!

I jumpered in a capacitor on both games (both with jumper cables and just winding the capacitor in, but did not solder it in place due to time) on both games.

For both games, for all four tests, it did not change.

Is the part boxed in yellow supposed to be connected to anything. From where the capacitor was wired (line with arrows) it is not clear to me how the tilt circuit even is supposed to work.

Both games appeared to be wired the same. I am sure I am missing something basic here.

Pictures below are without the capacitor.

Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

tilt bob 1 (resized).jpg

tilt bob 2 (resized).jpg

tilt bob 3 (resized).jpg

THAT makes sense. I will wire that up in the next day or two and report back. Thank you very much.

Thank you everybody for the help (especially Skins, that picture was worth at least a few hundred words).

I did a quick test with jumper cables and a cap and this time, with the circuit completed... it worked like a charm.

Next will be time to solder a permanent fix in place, and I will then be able to experience the joy of tilting away my bonuses