Have you spoken to Michael about the coils on Black Knight? I took a pinball repair class from him once at the Crucible [it was awesome--highly recommended if it's ever offered again!] and he specifically covered how to juice up flipper solenoids. He cares a lot about play experience, but I'm sure he's also pretty busy with that many machines to maintain.
I didn't.... I was there with my family and just mentioned it to the person charging admission.
Unfortunately, Black Knight wasn't the only machine suffering from it. I went back a couple months later and there was no improvement unfortunately.
I have mixed emotions about it. On one hand, I feel like it's a shame to put these machines out there when they're not really working properly. On the other hand, I feel like I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth. Just having a chance to see some of these old friends again is really worth the price of admission. And I can't even imagine the herculean effort it must take to keep things working as well as they do. Heck, new flipper coils are like $15-$20 a pop. Not sure what the expected life span is, but these machines get a LOT of use so it's got to be just insane and expensive to keep things in tip-top shape. And I really do respect and appreciate that.
I got the impression when I visited that the flipper strength on many games had been dialed down specifically to reduce the maintenance load on the rest of the playfield. It wasn't the same as wild instances of weak flippers where they tend to just be flaky and not trap up correctly.
I don't mind, the goal is preservation after all, and a lot of the SS games can be played elsewhere.
