We were aware of the issue with the hole protector before Pinball Expo and were already working on a solution to make it stronger. Fortunately, the issue has been resolved. We spot welded in an additional .036” stainless steel liner to the existing part.

The part is secured without tape. As the screws are tightened, the rubber grommets expand to clamp the part into place. The modified parts have been tested and have shown no signs of distortion.

IMG_6403 (resized).jpg

A quick update on MBr production...

We have sold 1,479 MBr and continue to receive new orders everyday. We would like to thank our customers and the entire pinball community for providing us the opportunity to do work that we love.

We are shipping MBr SEs and should complete the first 100 games by the end of today. We will continue to build SEs and a small number of CEs through the end of November.

We are waiting for two parts before we can start building LEs. Both parts are due in the last week of November.

We are scheduled to start building LEs for customers participating in the serial number matching program December 3rd. We are trying to ship all games in the serial number matching program before Christmas.

After Christmas we will begin building the balance of LEs at an initial rate of 75 per week. We are in the process of hiring and training a small number of people each week with the goal of increasing our production rate to 100 per week.

I hope everyone has great weekend!

Copied from a previous post...
CGC has received purchase orders from our dealers for all 1250 MBr LEs (less 10 pieces we held back for friends).

Dealers were required to submit deposits by 11/9/2018. As of today, we are still waiting for deposits from a small number of dealers. If a dealer fails to make deposits those units would be reallocated to other dealers.

The number units sold by CGC is a very different thing than the total number of units that dealers have sold through to end customers.

At this point, I believe approximately 2/3rds of dealers have sold through their allocations. Of course, distributors that receive smaller allocations tend to sell through their allocations first.

The production schedule for MBr remains unchanged at this point. We are doing our best to ship LEs to customers participating in the serial number matching program before Christmas. We will begin production of the balance of LEs after Christmas.

I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving!

We have confirmed customer comments that MBr is currently less loud than AFMr. Both games use identical hardware so the maximum volume levels should be comparable.

We reprocessed the audio files and now the maximum volume of MBr is very close to AFMr.

We will try to have a software update available by 12/31/2018.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!!

It is a current industry wide practice to have higher standards on playfields going into more expensive LEs.

Subpar playfield are stripped and rescreened or discarded and not used in any model.

We have been making playfields since 1977 and assembling pinball machines for less than two years. Remarkably producing playfields still remains our biggest challenge.

Quality expectations of collectors greatly exceed those of the operators that originally purchased the games.

If I built a time machine and brought brand new Williams machines from 1998 to the present, they wouldn’t meet the expectations of some collectors.

We have three original Monster Bash playfields in house and there are significant variances between the three. We would have rejected one playfield and the other two would not meet our standards for an LE.

The playfield is the backbone of a pinball machine, it is perhaps the most important component. We are very focused on producing outstanding playfields.

I will meet with Ryan on Monday and discuss how we can best disclose the differences in playfield standards between different models.

The difficulty is in distilling playfield quality standards down to a single bullet point on a sell sheet or even a more lengthy written definition.

It is still somewhat subjective. We continually try to formalize the definition of an acceptable playfield. Even months into production, Ryan and I are still called to the line almost on a daily basis to make the final call whether a specific playfield meets quality standards.

LCD panel manufacturers grade the quality of a panel using the specific number of dead pixels (A grade = 4 dead pixels, B grade = 8 dead pixels, etc). The number of dead pixels is quantifiable. That information is easily placed on a product data sheet. Grading playfields isn’t as easy.

I like the diamond analogy previously used. With both playfields and diamonds you are starting with raw materials formed by nature and not uniform synthetics. Both require skilled craftsmen to transform the raw materials into the final product. The variance in raw materials plus the variance introduced by human inconsistency yield a certain percentage of A, B and C grade products. Higher grade diamonds command higher prices. Surprisingly, well less than .01% of diamonds are graded as flawless. I suspect the percentage of flawless playfields occur at a similar rate to diamonds - I believe this to be true for all pinball machine manufacturers.

The challenge is in understanding and defining what is acceptable.

For every playfield that makes it into a game, there are a high percentage that are scrapped or reprocessed. We are not putting subpar playfields into any of our games.

We have shipped nearly four hundred non-LE Monster Bash. I believe we have only had three service tickets opened for playfield issues. With few expections, SE and CE customer feedback has been very positive.

Honest conversations can be uncomfortable but often lead to good things. I certainly gained a better understanding of what’s important to our customer.

We only build specific serial number matching LEs when the distributor indicates the customer has paid or when the distributor is willing to take the game into their inventory.

Ideally we are only building product that can immediately ship.