If you are getting dimples from that, you are probably getting (or soon will get) dimples and wear from the two upper kick-out holes. Never installed a repo playfield, but if I did, I would put a full playfield protector on it from day one.

If I spent that much time and money to make it look perfect, I'd want to keep it that way. Plus you could say "Playfield has never been touched by a ball!"

When i owned Jumping Jack, i initally tried 2 rubbers on the drops, but changed to one because of the bounce.

Those upper kickouts are a known wear area. I'd def mylar the area that the ball hits after the kickout.

If dimples are of concern, you should probably get a PF protector pronto.. but they usually don't bug me too much since they tend to just scatter and become a texture over time.

I have a Wade Jack in the Box playfield not installed as of yet. Has anybody out there installed this title and is havinb bal dimpling issues??Thanks

Ive seen dimpling on Abra pf's as well. I guess we need to clear coat.

Well Krause PFs have like 0 protection on them right? I was told to CC right away.

Pretty thin layer of clear. My Fast Draw will get re-cleared before I swap for sure

I don’t have a horse in this race, but this is the first I’ve heard of anyone needing to do anything to a WK playfield out of the box. Is it common for folks to add additional protection before they are installed?

My understanding was they are made the same as the original playfields which means they’ll last essentially forever with the typical play that games get today compared to when they were new.

Might be game dependent? I have a Kings & Queens so obviously it's just waiting to be destroyed, and was told to clear it if I wanted it to survive.

I'd rather have dimples.

Wade makes a great playfield. They need added clear if you are worried about wear or dimpling but I like what he does. He gives you an authentic looking playfield and lets you decide where to take it from there.

You don't have to get an auto clear that's glossy. You can tell whoever does your playfield to do a matte finish so it's more like a finish an EM would've originally had. It's never going to be an exact to what it was when originally made but that went out the window the minute you purchased a repo pf!

Good luck with whatever you decide!

No experience with those specific German protectors but a big thumbs up to playfield protectors in general.

I started making my own protectors about 3 years ago and have never looked back.

My main goal is to protect the playfield from further wear and smooth out the surface from bowed or sunken inserts. Obviously your new repo playfield will be smooth and the inserts will be flat so you won't need one for that. But, the protection it provides has no equal. If it get damaged from scratches, wear, or a freak accident you can replace it and save an expensive playfield.

The better the condition of the playfield the more important this protection becomes.

Think of it like insurance.

I have gone the route of 2 part auto clear(2PAC) for my repro playfields.

A fellow collector/hobbyist recommended it when we were discussing the repro Wade playfield for my Quick Draw many years ago. I was hesitant at first for an EM but his concern was the way some of the art screen layers sit higher than others on the playfield worrying they might be worn off. He had a quality affordable source for applying the clearcoat that he shared with me and I have never looked back.

Fast forward a few years when I finally installed the playfield in my game and I couldn't be happier. At first the ball did nothing but spin. But after about 50 games it settled down and played like a new game. The fact it is clearcoated doesn't come to mind in any way in how the game plays now.

At the same time, I'm convinced that Wade playfields are durable out of the box. Dimpling is part of it. It's pinball. Playfields have dimpled when new from the start of pinball. It is still a topic of discussion on brand new Stern and JJP games today.

If dimpling is a concern, the 2PAC takes care of it. The key is having convenient affordable access to the service. The guys I have used are body shops. Prepping and applying the clear is about as simple a process as it gets for an auto painter. But it still comes down to technique and attention to detail. The right guy can make it easy.

MikeO - How much did it cost to get your playfields clear coated?

We had 18 done at once, got a deal. Normally $200-300 depending on the final finish/polish

I installed one on a Bally ST because it has a nice PF but cupped inserts. The game definitely plays differently, in particular when you shoot a ball into play. I will do this on any future EE or EM games I buy unless they have a lot of star rollovers. ST only has two, but the ball likes to get stuck there.

I have seen it range from $150-$300 depending on who you use.

Not to bust anybodys bubble, I know a collector who ownes two two body shops and has cleared many of Wades Playfield for his collection. Some even with the extra clear have dimpled. Its more about the density of the wood. I've ordered multiple playfield of the same title for stock and have conducted a ball drop test on each playfield and the lighter (by almost a pound same title) got dimples and the heavier and denser playfield has none. Jut my 2 cents.

I get lots of playfields cleared. It took me a while to find the right person to do them. Lots tried and gave me substandard results. The guy I use now has worked with me to develop a process that gives us the best results. He applies 3 coats about 5 minutes apart and lets that dry a few days. Then he sands that with a long board to look for low spots. It goes back in the booth and the low spots are filled and then three more coats to level the board. After a few days the playfield is again sanded with a long board to ensure it is totally flat. If satisfied at that point, the playfield goes back to the booth for a final coat of ceramic clear (aka diamond plate). The playfield is inspected buffed and polished to a glass finish and boxed up. The entire process takes 2-3 weeks of which there is about 8 hours labor plus materials. My cost is $283 if there are no issues to be addressed.

Fantastic!

Anyone who restores games knows the wood quality of the cabs from the 50s and 60s is far superior to the 70s forward. Besides inferior wood they went to particle board, especially for the backs which is the absolute worst place for that junk to be put.

Nothing Wade can do about this. Hard steel dropping on soft wood. Auto clear is the solution. I love the glassy clear look. Didn't think I would but I do.

I see dimples in auto clear playfields too, is what it is till it levels out a bit after several hundred plays.

Since I don't see it on older playfields I have cleared I'd have to say its the wood as well.

I've clear coated hundreds of NOS playfields going back to the 1960s, and no matter what, they are going to dimple.

I've done Krause playfields and they are excellent quality

New Maple, old Maple, it's all the same. It's not an old growth wood, it only lives a short life.

Get your Krause playfield cleared, then tell the guy you only want it as shiny as Meguires Swirl Remover 2.0 (that level of gloss gives a pretty convincing EM look and feel)

I have German playfield protectors on my Bad Cats and Bally Atlantis. They offer excellent protection and here's my experience with them:

- Atlantis needed a few but very detailed paint touchups (scroll work on the A and B columns, the squid's head, all down to bare wood), essentially the areas that weren't covered by the full factory mylar where the playfield is still mint.

Waxing the paint touchup areas offered little protection and they soon started to wear down. Spot clear coating and mylar patching seemed like the wrong half measures and not in keeping with the rest of the otherwise perfect playfield.

Reproduction playfields or hardtops are not available for Atlantis so a playfield protector was the only option. It's been three years now and hundreds of plays later and I'm very happy with the protector's look, shine and protection.

- My CQ refurbished Bad Cats had a new CPR gold playfield installed and it didn't take too many plays to see dimpling forming from (h)airballs (especially from the new strong flipper mechs and coils).

After the experience with Atlantis, I immediately stopped playing Bad Cats and waited for a playfield protector to arrive from Germany. Two years after installation, it shows I definitely did the right thing. No more dimpling.

* [Also of note: My Bride of Pinbot Buthamburg reproduction playfield installed one year ago, shows no sign of wear or dimpling , so no playfield protector needed there].

A few words about playfield protectors in general:

- Some very minor and careful trimming of the protectors was needed for a perfect fit. I attribute this to the tiny factory variations in placing posts, ball gates and other playfield items.

- Playfield protectors are thin, less than an 1/8 of an inch thick but they still may raise certain areas and change the ball clearance tolerances in things like ball gates or star posts. (Eg: this is due to some playfield posts sitting on top of the protector and adjacent posts sitting on an area not covered by the protector). Just one or two places but a few washers in the right spots and all is remedied. (I also had to add a few washers to raise the height of some wire ramps).

- Never wax a playfield protector, a little soft brush vacuuming is all that's needed.

- Yes, a little dust, wax and playfield particles work their way under the protector but I'm finding it negligible especially in comparison to the protection given. Give the playfield a thorough cleaning and vacuuming beforehand.

- Delivery from Germany took nearly two months but it was worth it.

1 Atlantis pre paint5JPG (resized).JPG

2 Atlantis paint touch up (resized).jpg

5 Atlantis after playfield protector (resized).JPG

6 Bad Cats with Playfield Protector (resized).JPG

I've attached photos of my Atlantis, Wade playfield.
I personally sprayed one and a half coats of automobile clear to keep it thin but still experienced dimples. I have 700 plays on this since I installed it.
It's hard to photograph but there's hundreds of little dimples especially where the lower kickers are.

I did this a couple years ago I did reach out to Wade, he said the majority of the complaints are people who did the clear-coat.

Also to be clear I'm not upset with Wade I understand this is just something we got to deal with.
Also I'm an experienced auto painter and spray these in a heated downdraft paint booth in my body shop with premium quality BASF products.

I can say I've done some original play fields I turned the gloss down a little bit there's an additive that I added to the clear so it doesn't shine quite as much I think that could be part of the problem where you see the dimples with a high gloss, remember these were done in lacquer originally and does not shine anywhere near like an acrylic urethane does, but for an example my Abra ca dabra which has a lot more plays than the Atlantis looks almost perfect.

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I wonder if this has less to do with the actual clear coat and more to do with the expectations of those who clear coated and expected their playfields to remain perfect.

My Hearts and Spades has the same small dimples and it was done with autoclear.

I'm not excited about it.

Your car is steel, and is coated with automotive clear.

If you drop a pinball on it, you'll get a dimple or two

Yes, that is true.

People in the States seem to have a belief that wood from 50 years ago was some how magical and no longer available.

But Hard Maple's Janka hardness rating in the 1910s was 1400, and it's still 1400 in 2022.

It could be the thickness of the hard maple veneer has gone down. Along with more industrial sanding process. The individual ply might be using softer & now cheaper woods than pre 1980. Many sawmills & plywood plants have shut down the last 40 years.

Your talking to a population who will claim stradivarious is the gold standard in violins because of the wood.

They think it was the finishes he used, not the wood

Italy had the oldest and hardest damn wood ever

Double blind studies suggest that strads and mass produced violins sound the same.

It's just brand, mythos and elitism that inflates the prices.

1) EM's tend to have less powerful hardware than their solid state brethren, I can't even recall the last time I even had an airball on an EM.

2) I think the 50 year old playfields are all leveled out by now

Someone mentioned wood quality, I concur on the cabinets being much better back in the 60's based on a few restorations I did. The joint work was amazing and the cabinets were very solid. Tight-tight-tight.

Edit: My 10,000 post!

Again, all that speculation does, is feed into conspiracy theories that wood 40 years ago was somehow magic, and we are secretly being cheated today.

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You can order any thickness you want for the face veneers on plywood. It's not like it **secretly has gone down** in thickness

The internal plys are all still Maple. (Unless you intentionally order some Spruce core junk like they sell at home depot...lol)

Of course many sawmills have gone out of business, and of course, many new ones have opened up

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Today's quality plywoods are way better than the stuff they used to sell 50 years ago. More stable, more plys, waterproof glues.

Next time you go to a real plywood supplier, check out the amazing Can-Am Gold, Apple Ply, Fin Ply, Baltic Birch - all great stuff to us woodworkers

This. I worked in the Ernie Ball woodshop for more than 6 years. We used finply for every jig and cabinets for NAMM and pretty much everything else except guitar parts. It's still the shit. Also Baltic Birch Ply is killer

Many people's exposure to wood quality is through softwood construction lumber, and that has indeed changed quite a bit over the years - see image below. Fir grown in modern, optimized forest conditions is way softer than older examples that grew in competition, growth rings are much tighter, and the old wood is much, much stronger and harder. I don't think anyone would contest this. So it's understandable folks would assume hardwoods and other type of wood products have also become inferior over the years.

Keep in mind Janka ratings are simply an average of many samples. Hard maple ranges from 39.6 to 48.4 lbs/ft3 in density, so even though the official Janka may be 1400 (or 1450 in other sources), Mr. Janka himself found that hardness is proportional to the density of the wood. So if the density has a range, so does the Janka, even if the industry wants a single number.

Furthermore, regional variation of trees has a huge influence on density. I know for sure that local Texas walnut I've felled and milled here in Dallas is at least twice as heavy as the Appalachian-grown stuff I sometimes buy. So it's quite possible certain plywood manufacturers sourced harder material for specialty products, back when there were more mills everywhere. And even if we assume hard maple itself hasn't changed much in density, the sugar maples from years ago very likely had longer, straighter, and more branch-free boles for the rotary veneer plies used in plywood. Which results in fewer voids and glue pockets.

I would agree that glue tech and manufacturing processes are better now, but I'm not sure that necessarily translates into better products. In many cases, products of the past were overbuilt as a sort of quality "safety margin", whereas today manufacturers can dial in the cheapest possible inputs to produce a product that just barely meets specs.

This article shows how little relation a Janka rating can have to an actual piece of wood
https://hardwoodfloorsmag.com/2018/01/05/wood-hardness-part-2-variations-results/

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Because veneer is peeled off the trunk in extremely thin layers, the density of the tree doesn't come into play as it would with dimensional lumber. But there are many important factors that contribute to hardness of the veneer and the substrates. Climactic conditions of where the tree was grown, the age of the tree when harvested, thickness of veneers, can all impact the quality of veneer. And it should be pointed out that old hardwood veneer plywood ( that has aged and seasoned for decades) is usually harder and much less flexible than newly produced hardwood plywood. A process of fortifying the wood AHEAD of screen printing would be the correct way to make the wood resistant to compressing ( denting ) Applying clear coat is going to do little toward stopping the veneer from compressing.

Anyone who has remodeled homes will tell you than even in the 1920s and onward, new growth lumber was often used. I've never seen any old growth lumber in any post war houses. It's nice to see some actual old growth lumber re-milled into a table top or something, but that has no bearing on 30 year old pinball machines.

And, of course don't confuse Maple with "old growth" construction lumber

Guys at the local mill laugh when kids come in asking for "Old Growth" Maple for their "special kitchen project"

That point is that they went to a lower quality of wood later on, especially in cabinets. You restore an early 60s Gottlieb, then do a late 70s Williams then come back here and tell me there's no difference in wood quality used.

Cab quality really went up in the late 80s-90s , when they started using MDO plywood.

Smoother than a baby's ass, it allowed much better screening graphic quality

If you do anything to a Wade Krause playfield other than install it and play it, you’ll devalue your game. Just my 2 cents.

If you really can’t stand dimples, then I’d suggest several layers of Mylar near any kickout holes. Or a less kinetic collecting hobby.

Never ends with the wood hardness discussions

Literally like watching people argue over cats & dogs.

I can forgive new collectors for saying “hey, what’s up with these dimples?” But there’s no excuse for those of us who have been collecting for 5+ years. If you think dimples are an anomaly and a Bad Thing, you’re essentially a pinball flat-earther.