did you notify Homepin as that is bad

The Chinese are well known to not having pure metals as they mix alot of crap in with metals. Having worked in engineering we had a expensive scanner that could test metals and nearly everything from China was a blend and therefore lacked the strength and qualities compared to what it was supposed to have. In the end we bought from every country but China so would bet in isn't a pure metal.

Homepin had Premiums and Pearls and think the premiums were polished for 3 days and pearls for 5 days - something to that effect (time could be wrong but something like that).

Aussie Pinball is another Aus Forum and I must of missed the notification of a recall on that one.

Also Pinside is a highly visited site by many Aussies and great place to notify people.

I checked out the other thread on the aussie forum (AA) and the OP was in the beginning just sharing an opinion of pin balls and then shot down by forum members and yourself, but thought he was polite and factual. There is lots of negative things said about Pinside and Pinsiders in general plus a paticular one as well which isn't helping things for you and the pinball industry. At the end of the day you had a faulty product and did a vague public recall (on AA only) so without the OP we Pinsiders would not be aware of the potential damage to games by a Homepin product as there are many Pinsiders that live in Aus.

Great to hear that you are investigating and hope the product improves, but maybe hire someone to do the damage control.

chipping and flaking of carbon steel can occur due to a number of issues:
- electrical discharge as vid stated
- impurities in the steel when the balls were made as China is know for it's backyard melt down of steels and a blend of steels due to poor practice of cleaning out and separating certain elements in the liquid steel phase
- to get the shine I am sure Homepin tumbled these balls for 7 days straight so if all together say 1000 balls are already exposed to impacts with each other
- some oils and lubricants can affect the ball bearings so if tumbled in a certain oil it could contribute to a poor quality bearing

You would think the last 2 would affect other balls as well but does depend on the unlucky impurities in the balls, electrical discharge and contact with magnets - so many possible variables.

A quick way to cancel out the quality of the metal is a simple x-ray scan. In a previous job we used one of these to check the steel coming into the tool room for press components and we found that steel from China is radically different form one end to the other end of a 2m bar so we stopped getting Chinese steel for the purpose that we needed it. These are handy to check all sorts of things and quite often the gold jewellery collectors have one.

Maybe if someone could scan a standard pinball life ball and a homepin ball and see what the differences are to quickly cancel out or identify a issue. But have to say no one should be implying someone is a liar until thorough testing has been done.
x-ray-metal-tester_(resized).jpg

these are the original homepin balls
balls13_(resized).jpg

and this is just a search result of Case Hardened Steel Balls off the net, would be interested to see the similarities / differences of a homepin ball as well as pinball life and all the other ones floating around and available
screen-capture-2_(resized).png