The top of screws for the posts only have a bit of shaft on top of them for the acorns to screw onto so I can't fathom how you could screw them down and still have 1/4" of space between the acorn nut and the plastic. Are you sure you are screwing them on all the way and they are gripping and actually tightening down? They don't always easily screw on and you may have to push down while putting them on since the top of the screw is not actually threaded.

In one of his videos, Tim Arnold said the plastic should be "floating"; it should not be tight under the screw. If the pal nut is biting onto the unthreaded post and not moving, and the plastic isn't falling off, everything is OK.

You should be able to fasten an acorn all the way down until it touches the plastic. Like ts4z said, however, you don’t want to do that. You should leave a little bit of clearance so the plastic doesn’t absorb all the shock from getting struck.

That said, a quarter inch of clearance is way too much. It probably looks like somebody with a baseball cap perched on the crown of their head. When you take the acorn off, are there threads going down most of the way to the hex?

It’s possible that whoever restored this Gold Strike replaced all the hex posts, which come unthreaded. It’s up to the buyer to thread them. This requires a socket screwdriver to turn the acorn, a vise (outside the game) or palnut tool (inside the game) to hold the hex post in place, and some torque to drive the acorn down and carve the threading.

Pics of your posts would be nice, so we can see what’s going on.

When I read this post I had the same thought. It takes some work to get those acorn nuts in place. A friend gave me the clue to put a flat nut inside the socket on the nut driver, then the acorn nut, so that you can get some downward pressure on it and cut the threads keeping the nut straight. +1 on getting one of those palnut tools from PBR to hold the post while you’re doing this.

Dave