SafeCracker high scores

Same old story.. busy with a lot of things, it's winter so I don't come much in my (at the moment still) unheated gameroom.

Last month we did move SafeCracker back into the house !
So I get to play that game again more often.
I have it now for about 5 years but never actually had a high score on it. Maybe once or twide I could enter my initials as far as I can remember.

So now I have a new goal - playing the game until I get my initials in the highscore (and maybe GC ??).

Reading RGP I find out I'm not the only one who has this problem.. the game is hard and challenging. It plays very fast but also needs to be tuned correctly. The ramp and cellar shot are quite difficult to make on my machine (only around 1 in 4 times it makes it, the other times the pinball rolls back down the ramp and almost drains) and these shots are crucial to get a high score.

I started first aiming to get a highscore on the Assault the Vault game.
Put a magic token it and start the multiball frenzy..
The trick to get a high score in this part of the game is to aim for the lower left set of drop targets, the cellar and the ramp. I don't bother shooting the pinball up towards the bumpers anymore..

In the past I usually got around 3 million points. Last week I finally got over 5 million using this strategy and could enter my initials. Great !
This weekend I played a few more games and got 7.8 and 7.9 million points. Excellent !

Next goal is to achieve a highscore during the regular game.
The wried thing about this is that first time I played a SafeCracker (somewhere in 2001 or 2002) at someone elses house, I immediately got an excellent score on it and could enter my name (had 5.5 million if my memory serves me right). All this without knowing what I did, how the rules were, ... that highscore even made me doubt if I would search for a Safecracker pinball machine to buy or not, as it seemed an easy game. (boy was I wrong, now I did learn its rules) Must've been beginners luck..
Anyway I'll first see if I can tweak the right flipper so the cellar and ramp shot can be made more consistant. Once it is, that GC score must become mine !