Aren't dimples supposed to be from impacting the wood, but this is the insert. So is this poor clear or what?

I can see why.

There is a square of Mylar over that insert.

His Iron Maiden review is crazy. "Like it and fun to play, but not top 10 or maybe even 20." - rated 2.8/10. I honestly believe he does not know how the rating system works, lol.

Oh he damn well knows what he is doing.
He is reading these posts right now and his troll heart is beating with excitement to our reactions of his reviews.

Has anyone done any hardness testing on an older NOS playfield versus a newer one? I'm not trying to feed into anyone's conspiracy theories, but when I owned LOTR and TSPP, those playfields seemed to have much less dimpling on them compared to newer Stern games. My Metallica is very dimpled, even over the inserts. Does it bother me? Not really.

This may have been brought up before, but perhaps the decrease on allowable VOC's for coatings has increased the time it takes for the new clears to harden, or they don't harden to the point that the older solvent based clears do?

Edit: all examples were HUO.

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Yes, it's been done. Don't have the thread link right now, but LoTR was found to be harder. Every time this subject comes up, I go look at my LoTR (HUO) again and try to find dimples. I don't see any. After looking for a minute or two and finding just the right reflection, I can see the slightest of waviness in the white target reflection. There's definitely variance in how bad playfields dimple. I do have Stern Trek and GB which have the normal level of dimpling.

I may be old, but I ain't holy

My favorite line, "I just like watching the Nazi melt"

Found it, but it's installed playfields, and I guess it's a rebound test, not the technical hardness test vid is talking about?

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/live-dimple-quest-the-ultimate-test#post-3963579

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/playfield-dimple-reality-check/page/4#post-3984595

Many others chimed in their LoTR doesn't dimple like other games.

Not yet.

The ONLY real way to test wood hardness is with a Janka testing rig.

No other testing has been adopted by the luthier or lumber industries.

I've offered to bring a Janka to Expo and test some of these "no dimple" playfields, but people would rather argue than do hard science.

Nothing wrong with striving for excellence...

Even 39 year old NOS playfields, with 2pac topcoats, will dimple as soon as you put them into use.

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I can't believe we are really doing this again. I don't care how hard your wood is (oh my)...steel is going to dent it, and no clearcoat is going to change that. I swear this is as bad as the flat Earth crap, LOL!

Good news is if you keep playing the hell out of it, the dimples won't matter as much.

My current F-14:

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on the older playfields the lighting made the wood get hot. [heat treat] that made the wood harder in a shorter time. if you ever tried to put a nail in a old 2x4
it gets hard. the LED lighting dos not put out heat.and new sterns play faster also

But too scared to come back?

No nothing at all, what this ends up causing however is that the employees end up coaching the customers, and only pointing out the survey to ones they know will answer the way they want, and the store managers and district mangers don't care, because they get good surveys, and that becomes the metric of their success, but not a true measurement of it.

Yes the system can be played, I know, I worked the system to my advantage when I worked in field service. What the manager's are supposed to do is follow up on questionable reviews to see what can be done to improve, but sometimes also turned into more sales opportunities for the company.

Its probably ok when its CGC or Spooky or JJP I mean all u have to do is read the POTC JJP threads to see how forgiving pinsiders can be but this site is a Stern basher first and foremost.

It was a horrible game

It's not our fault you suck at hard games.

Hey man, Spooky PF's don't dimple!!!

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The ONLY playfields that don't dimple are playfields that have not been played on. Period.

The ball making contact with the surface of the playfied.

LUCKY SOB! I am on the wrong coast, I bet that was amazing!

You know you are welcome on either coast and even in the middle! I hope all is well out in Cali.

Brad

I'm somewhat of a newbie, but my routed BK2K has zero dimples while my brand-new AFMr has tons of dimples. Does it bother me? Not really. I get a metric f-ton of airballs in AFM, which is part of the fun, while I rarely get them in BK2K. The mylar probably helped a little bit too, and maybe the playfield has flattened out from thousands of plays.

As long as it doesn't affect gameplay, it doesn't matter.

Modern clearcoat is more prone to the bigger dimples, so they look worse. Meh.

I don't remember my Zizzle POTC having any dimples...

zizzle.jpg

Wait, wait! Are you saying the Earth isn't flat?

Modern lighting also makes dimples stand out.

The only way you prevent dimples is to not play the machine. That kind of defeats the purpose of owning the game though.

I can't wait to get my potc so I can just stare at it and wax it occasionally!

All I know is that crap won't happen with a deeproot machine. Remember a sledgehammer will be put to playfield and if it make a mark it won't ship.

Could be a prop foam sledge hammer for all we know

If that's really 'normal' then I would never buy one. I have 30 year old machines that don't have anything like that on them, and they were all on routes. I respect some of the more experienced peoples opinions, but I feel that's a bit too forgiving for something you are dropping so much cash on and are hardly even broken in. This shouldn't be happening to that degree with only 100-300 plays on it.

30-year-old machines have had 30 years and tens of thousands of plays for the dimpling to even out.

The photos you're seeing of new games are, what, weeks old with a couple hundred plays at most?

That doesn't even sound plausible. Even with 1000's of plays much of the play areas would be uneven because certain areas get more wear than others. They are not miraculously going to be even from the ball rolling on it. You would see large dimples where balls dropped over and over smooth out but still sit lower than the rest of the pf. I get that some could be expected in certain areas...but that looks horrible.

Take a look at the photo I posted of the AFM earlier.

The area where balls don't go is perfectly smooth. The areas the balls can access are uneven, but not by very much. Wood can only compress so much, so dimples aren't very deep. 1mm at most, maybe?

Yes, some of the issue could be (and probably is) the materials being used today, or possibly the newness of the material (as in the wood not being completely dried, or the clear not being fully cured). But you still have dimpling either way, and it eventually evens out. Most of the time it isn't even noticeable because the dimples are shallow and the light has to hit them just right to reveal them.

This is not the first thread about this issue.

What I'd like to see is someone take a modern playfield and add some sort of a cyclical mechanism that continuously drops and rolls balls across the playfield and measure how long it takes for everything to even out.

To me that looks bad for a pretty much brand new game. People are showing pics of dimpling form much older games, like the comet Vid posted, but you can't compare the two because one is new and the other probably has thousands of plays on it. I would expect dimpling, but not crazy like that. Maybe its just the magnification, lighting or angle that makes it look that bad?

Not taking either side as I do not want to battle it out, but how many games are you guys playing when these dimples show up? Just wondering if I will encounter them at some point in games I have cleared myself. So far I have not had this problem, thankfully.

All I can say is trust your eyes and connect the dots....err dimples.

Because over time, the dimples will become so numerous that the playfield will begin to "flatten" out. Check out this WCS 94. It's a reimport that probably has tens of thousands of plays. From a distance, it looks smooth. When you look up close, you can see all kinds of dimples. Look at the reflection in the purple section of the closeup.

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That still doesn't look nearly as bad as the OP. I think that's the question here. The OP pic the picture is almost blurred where the dimples are.