Here's the deflector plate:

http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/01-6793

But I'd follow Markmon's suggestion and just take the damn thing out and line the rails with dead drop foam. Works like a charm. (I just did it!)

It looks like the exact same one. You can always send it back if it doesn't fit.

Yes, that's what you need. Just take out the entire back plate and line the sides and back with the dead drop foam. It'll take you one or two pieces, but order five or so...you'll use it for other applications. And no, the stuff at Home Depot is for air conditioning...not for deadening the velocity of a pinball.

And you can try to leave the back plate in, but Chris at HEP and I both tried different things and the only one that truly worked was to just remove it altogether.

Yes. Trial and error. Literally. You might also have to bend the small metal piece that guides the ball onto the POA. You want to make sure that it allows you to dump the ball into either lane. If not adjusted just right, you'll never get it into the left lane.

But really, it will take quite a bit of tweaking and patience.

Ah! Well, that's pretty normal. Mine is leveled correctly, and I usually have to alternate the ball from one side to the other to keep it from flying off the wall and into the hole. I think it may have been designed that way with those little scoops on the side that fling the ball into the center.

What you can consider doing is putting a washer or two under the front support of the POA. This will lift it a bit so the ball moves a little more slowly and doesn't fly off the wall. But that would be cheating.

I've got my game jacked to around 7.5 or even slightly more. Makes it fast as hell. No problems with live catches, although I suck at it.

Haven't you heard? That's cheating! I'm glad somebody agrees with me around here...

I'll answer that: Nothing. The opto is a ramp entrance opto and is on the other side of the small guide rail. It's nearly impossible for the ball to hit that when being ejected--it would hit the rail first and careen away from the opto. Bigger concern is the diode on the underside of the upper playfield direcly above it, which normally gets squashed. But some enterprising young German (Austrian?) made a shield for it that's somewhere in this thread, I believe. Dude should sell that, stat!