I hate the bricking on my Centaur. Drives me nuts. It's way more pronounced on games where the targets face the player directly. Anything where the ball can glance the target from the side is pretty good. Centaur's dead-on hard shots are killer for this.
I did read about a fix... but it was pretty involved.
Joe Grenuk posted some stuff on RGP ages ago and there were several things that made it better and finally, one thing that he says fixed it.
First he tried stiffening the targets (especially newer repro ones) that are relatively flexible. A bricked shot essentially flexes the head back far enough that it hits the wood or rubber and it snaps back into place and the notch doesn't slip off and let it fall. He stiffened them by pouring epoxy into the hollow backs of the targets and inserting a nail for rigidity.
Then he shaved a bit of plastic off the little lip that holds it up.
After that he added a 2nd spring (a la Gottlieb). To do this he drilled his bracket to run a metal post across the front of each target and added a 2nd spring to each that attached to this rod (instead of the factory arm). This spring added additional downward and forward force.
Joe then also added some Teflon grease to the wood opening just behind the target to create more 'slip'.
And the easiest of all, he loosened the entire assembly and pushed it as far forward as possible to give the targets more room to fall back and down.
Apparently, all of this improved the issue, but did not resolve it 100%.
Not wanting to give up, he decided to experiment with a variety of different spring setups. He describes how he did a different arrangement for all 4 ORB targets on his Centaur. The one that worked best involved doubling up the original spring so that both springs attached to the same hole in the target and then went down in a tight V shape to the factory rod. One slightly left and the other to the right.
He stated that this setup worked almost flawlessly. Now, I don't know if all of the original modifications he had already done contributed to the success, or if this simple spring fix would have done the trick alone.... but I would be inclined to start with the 2nd spring and then shifting the bank forward before I tackled any of the other ones.
That being said, I'm lazy and my Centaur works fine, so I have not yet been motivated to try any of this.
Good luck!
Hope you can break the "Bally Brick Wall"
