This actually raises a good point. That opto always tests good. It isn't dirty or anything. Seems fine and always works during testing. One thing I noticed that happened a few times - when you have 2 balls locked sometimes it will randomly give you the third ball like you'd locked it. It isn't something that happens a lot, but enough to have noticed it. I always shrugged it off and thought maybe that second ball locked hit and bounced up enough to trigger that third switch (or something). The Super Skill Shot thing also only happens once in a while. If opto 44 is the one that registers the skill shot that would be the same for locking the third ball. That would indicate to me that something is flaky with opto 44. It just fails occasionally but not where I can manually reproduce it. Cold solder point maybe? I think to test this, I'm going to reheat those solder points on the optos. If it still happens, I'm going to swap 44 with 46 (center ramp enter). If that stops this behaviour, then I can set the game to virtually lock balls until I get a new part to replace the opto.

If I had to guess how mine failed, I'm going to speculate the ship post got stuck halfway from the roll pin coming out. This caused a ball to remain stuck behind it. The coil repeatedly fired because it knew a ball was there and it was trying to dump it from the ship. After a particular amount of time, the transistor overheated and cooked closed. This fed power to the coil until it melted and then the fuse popped.

It looks like all of these issues are from a single faulty opto in the ship. I can't really fault American Pinball. It's just a third party device they're using. Of course it probably would never had happened if they used actual switches. I'm not a huge fan of using optos. They're cheap to install, but often expensive to repair.