My lost mine kick is being a pain. I just recently replaced the coil, coil sleeve, grommet, and cleaned everything. Now if the ball comes from the Whirlpool all is great, but if the ball trickles in via the kickout, it is not recognized. Once the game goes into ball search mode it will award the lost mine hit, then kick the ball out.

Why is the game not recognizing lost mine hits until after ball search mode?

its an opto. this was my suspicion. just seems weird that from whirlpool there are no issues.

so i reflowed all the wires on the opto. The switch is registering in switch test. it works fine when entered from the whirlpool. If a ball trickles in from the front, it is now quickly registering all three hits to start gold rush. Things still point to a flaky opto just making sure this might not be a matrix thing.

replaced the opto and the issue appears to be fixed. The opto passed all tests but it was still the culprit.

OK so this issue ended up being due to the arm being too long in the VUK. It created a ridge that slow rolling balls got stuck on. I ground down the nylon with my belt sander and all is good now!