Pre-2000 Early late modern? Kyoraku "Bomber Cat" machine with some issues

[Habilis]

Hi, everyone. My name's Dave and I'm writing you from sunny SoCal--long time reader, first time poster. A few months ago I had the very good fortune of finding a Sankyo Comet II on shopgoodwill.com for $11 (plus shipping)! Anyway, that's what kicked off my pachinko fever mode. I'm in the middle of taking that one apart and giving it a good cleaning. I *think* it'll end up working OK once I've put it back together. I'm sure I'll have lots of questions about it over the next few months. I was pretty sure I only needed one pachinko game in my life but then I saw this l'il cutie on eBay for a very reasonable price and located only 1/2 hour away.
Bomber Cat Glamor Shot.jpg

Here's what I know. It's got a bunch of stickers in English on the frame and case that say things like "Reward Hopper" and "Jackpot release" (see below). This tells me that it was purchased for resale in the US and modified accordingly.

Bomber Cat English Tag2.jpg
It's also got a yellow tag that says something like "Inspected and cleaned April 2000," which tells me that the game itself is no newer than 2000, at least. If anyone can provide more chronological info about this machine I'd love it.

As far as I can tell it seems to be working OK, although the spring on the auto-launcher is, well, sprung--it's loose and floppy and I can't get the balls to go all the way across the top of the field. I'm hoping I can replace that with a hardware store spring at some point. Here's a photo of the back of the machine.
Bomber Cat backstage-bigger.jpg

The real issue is that there is some sort of mechanism in the bottom right of the game that is basically a bladed wheel attached to an electrical motor (the "50hz/24 volt" image you see below). The blades on this wheel seem to either trigger or count off a number of balls dropping into the lost ball bin, in two separate channels, and after a certain point I believe they trigger a bigger reward or fever mode or something.
Bomber Cat Jackpot jam CLEAR.jpg
The issue is that for some reason, the balls jam in either the front (6-ball?) channel of this assembly or in the back channel. See below.

I can free them up with a pair of pliers and force them to manually drop, but that's not really sustainable. This also seems to lead to a ton of balls accumulating in the assembly below, which I guess (?) are meant to be released during some sort of fever mode or super-jackpot or something.
Bomber Cat Jackpot pileup.jpg
I don't know if it's a strictly mechanical problem, or if, because this game has a LOT of circuits and so on, there's some sort of programming or timing issue I need to address. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all the informative posts and just generally interesting stuff on this site! Also, I apologize in advance for any image issues... the uploader on this site is a little clunky.