You mean the power distribution board with all the big filter capacitors on it?

I would buy them one at a time about a month apart to keep my monthly pinball expenditures in check and yeah, Go Stern, if my extra purchase helps keep them in business that much longer... yea! I thought buying NIB pinball machines was a good way of keeping new titles coming, no matter who makes them, or how much they gouge me for the parts or the original machine. We can complain all day, and if I was an op, I might complain to somebody besides all of us riff raff on Pinside, but I bought a Stern Pin when they were the only shop in town because I wanted a new pinball machine, I wanted to help Stern stay in business and hopefully sell me another machine in the future. The halcyon days of Bally Williams are over, and people just can’t seem to let go of that. As a personal HUO purchaser of pins, Stern’s reliability is of a minimum concern since HUO machines don't normally get hammered like machines in the wild. I heard Roger Sharpe say something one time that Bally/Williams biggest competitor was older Bally/Williams machines. This may be coming true with Stern and Spike now as well.

No idea but that's kind of the point. It must be tough for Stern to diagnose problems when so many pins are customized with everything from light up dolls to custom displays to software that hacks the rom. Who knows what happens when some novice grabs a mod off ebay and alligator clips it somewhere under the pf. If a mod did blow up their pin, I imagine most guys wouldn't own up to it and just blame Stern. Not saying that is happening in all these bad node cases but I imagine it is something Stern deals with on a regular basis.

I didn't read this whole thread, but just sharing my problem.

I bought a shaker motor from Stern and installed it on my Iron Maiden. It wouldn't work. Diagnosis? Cabinet node board is faulty. Out of warranty and not even 5 months old. How was I supposed to know the board was faulty until I installed the shaker motor? I won't say I'll never buy another Stern, but I'm taking it into serious consideration in the future that they don't support their products.

I would tell your distributor you are not buying any more games until they replace the node board. As long as people keep pouring money into the games they have no incentive to provide better warranty support.

I don't get how this is the distributor's problem really. Stern is the one making a faulty product and refusing to support it. Is the distributor going to lean on Stern to get the part for free or are they going to eat the cost themselves?

yes indeed, the main power board.

I think mods are a bit of a red herring here, loads of folks with failures that have no mods.

I thought that's what distributors were for, to provide support for the products they sell and to act as the buffer between the end user and the factory.

Stern's product support gave me a link to my distributor's node board sales page when I told them who I bought it from.....

I've already ordered it from PinballLife. I'll do better about kicking up a fuss first next time.

It's a distributor's problem if people stop buying games from them because of the fickle, poorly-warranteed nature of the product. And it's distributors who have Stern's ear to fix things, because that's where Stern gets paid.

well the car manufacturers are kind of like that with the dealers.

Not exactly. I run a Kia dealership and customers with failure level issues have the ability to contact Kia Consumer Affairs to help get resolutions to issues that are beyond the dealer’s responsibilities.

I would think that with the purchase of an LE pinball machine nearing the price of a Kia Forte base model that Stern would minimally extend the electronics warranty period out for straight up replacement boards and an additional period of time for customers to send in boards for repair if for no other reason than to gather enough data to determine commonality between failures to help them engineer a better product, cut down on support and ultimately grow more business by showing that they care for their customers.

Ultimately if they do find a common failure point after all of the above a recall that would cover original owners which would be facilitated by their distributors would seem logical, similar to the auto industry.

But hey, what do I know!

I laughed out loud we’re talking about Stern, right?

I didn’t say it wasn’t laughable!

What about the eu warranty laws will the distributors have to eat the costs and they are the ones what have to deal with the warranty starting when it shiped vs when the end user get's it? Or does the warranty laws cover the distributors as well?

I would; especially when I keep seeing recent buyers with a dead board stick it to the man by... buying a replacement!

Take that Stern

I guess that assumes that Stern are interested to find out the cause of failures. If they already have a good idea of the lifespan of components then their attitude might simply be that customers are expected to suck it up and buy new node boards.

I think you can read a lot into how long a manufacturer is prepared to stand behind their products in terms of offered warranty, and the fact that the warranty on node boards on a brand new pin is 2 months speaks volumes in my opinion.

The only way to see any of this change is to band together, either by collectively deciding to not buy new machines or to collectively file an action against Stern and see what happens.

If purchasers of NIB Stern games that have had failures (none yet here on 4 NIB... knock on wood) do nothing but bitch on Pinside or attempt to get resolution from Stern one off it is highly unlikely anything will ever change.

All things considered I am not sure there is enough data to really know failure rate.

You would need to know total number of units built, sold and in use. Build date of each machine and who assembled it at the factory. Where they are in use, environmental factors and play counts. Mods installed. Does the game have a shaker, factory installed or aftermarket.

If you really want to get somewhere with this someone should setup a google form that would ask these questions and more and log the responses to a spreadsheet and work toward building standardized responses in order to have a real data set to work from.

Just my $.02

Don't think suing Stern is very constructive unless you can prove some negligence. No pin runs forever without faults and not exactly uncommon to have an issue or two out of box. Nothing is going to change unless sales drop. People often complain about prices going up and features down but Stern sales are better than over. $9000+ for an LE? Sold out in minutes. $25k for Beatles pin based on old 80s pin with spinning disk? Gone. If the operators and heavy hitters that buy lots of nib complain to distributors and stop buying, I bet that message would get to Stern. Even if people started dumping older Spike games and used prices dropped, I bet Stern would notice that.

Spike games are often listing for the same or less than a lot of SAM games. At least the ones I'm watching. Iron Man original and vault are typically 5-5.4k and POTC is 4500-5200 where Maiden is ~5, AS is 4500, DP is ~5100. That's a pretty steep dive considering what those SAM games were going for NIB compared to Spike games NIB. I know SAM games are being helped a little with increased NIB prices, but that doesn't change the fact that used Spike games are not holding value very well going to the used market.

This whole thing has me leaning more towards the SAM games I'm looking for instead of the Iron Maiden I have at the top of my list. I route these games. I don't want to eat several hundred dollars if a board goes bad. At present, they can't be easily fixed. If that changes, I'm sure my perspective will as well.

Schematics are coming this month hopefully stern comes through

In Australia consumers are covered nationwide by the "Australian Consumer Guarantee" , for ANY item they buy worth less than $40k.
ANY item.
This applies outside and completely independent of warranties provided.

Yet to be tested out with the pinball industry here yet HIGH success rate for consumers across ALL other industries.

Time will tell how this plays out - but known faults that are previously documented (like NODE board problems ) always slant to the consumers favour in the eyes of the bodies that make the decisions.

Other games appreciating after they are out of production is not the same thing as spike depreciating. Recent games like maiden and do have to compete with nib availability so any used edition is going to be less. People were still getting pros for 5200 so selling at 5000 is nothing to be concerned over.

Games like potc have held their value and climbed because it was a proven earner. And the range is more like 4-4.5

Higher ones are loaded with mods.

Released:
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JK, hoping they do.

wow, that's great news.

Don't forget the outputs! (just as proprietary)

Seriously; umm.. have you been paying attention?
I know with 100% certainty the Stern Star Trek games have no power budget on the GI. Try putting an Evo Cap in the pop bumper areas. Causes malfunctions because the node board design actually measures for current draw.

I think everyone needs to lock themselves in a dark room and recite this quote 10 times...

Consider me educated I assumed there would be some overhead built into the board design.

With all due respect, I disagree. StarTrek is a SAM game. I’ve run 15” backboard led strips and 6” trough lights off the gi with no issue. No issues doing that with spike either.

Great video to watch if you haven't already seen.

Your disagreement is noted as a incorrect.

Star Trek Prem/LE was the FIRST design to use an early revision of the Node board. I don't personally know (without schematics for spike) if they are very closely or loosely related. On the Prem/LE; ALL the RGB inserts run off of "Node" boards under the PF. This include the popcap leds and most if not all of the white GI LEDs. The brain/cpu board may be SAM; but the under PF boards are defiantly node-like. The STLE has the exact same microcontroller as the Spike boards (LPC1112) [See post #302 above]. If I were a betting man; I'd bet the STLE "node boards" used a similar protocol as the new spike game and that Stern "used" STLE as a springboard to the latest versions of the SPIKE node boards.

You've been very lucky; because I have 4-6 customers (myself included) who have seen malfunctioning RGB inserts if you load the "node board" Vcc powersupply which generated on the main node board #5 and supplies power to ALL RGB inserts. Some games clearly have more margin that others... but I wouldn't take any bet that there is enough margin in the STLE design to keep them running in 10-15 years when the crappy DC/DC PSU caps on node board 5 age beyond the margin's ability to compensate.

No it is not. This guy has his nose out of joint because he was parallel importing NIB Stern games in to Australia and got caught out by Stern. Stern stopped his supply of machines (he was selling spike games) and surprise surprise he made that video and all of a sudden, Spike became an issue. Plenty of sour grapes in that interview.
If you agree with him, I suggest that you do not buy any recent games from any manufacturer. All are using a similar system to run their games.

I bought a B66 late last year from the Aus Distributor but my first alarm bell was they did not repack eafter inspecting (and in hind sight should of checked better there), I got it home and set up and in better light identified decals bubbling in a few areas, plunger off at a odd angle etc and worst of all bubbling of clearcoat / art near the apron, slings and posts just above the slings.

They disagreed with some of the issues but said if I didn't want it to bring it back at my cost which at $200 each way for transport was worth it so to get my $12.5k back for the game. No option to fix, replace the playfield and can't say they were polite on returning either but I wasn't a jerk or unreasonable.

At the time and prior I said if Munsters comes I definitely want it and they put me on the list, BUT now crickets - they no longer want to sell me a STERN pinball. I wasn't a difficult customer and accepted the game not being re-boxed as requested for pickup etc and would of accepted a replacement playfield. Sadly from that experience no apologies and no interest to sell me any new games.

So in the scheme of Aussie rights they were fairly good though I should of been fixed up for the freight but I was not difficult or a pain as I wanted to keep good relations for the future, but obviously they don't see me as a customer anymore, so I don't have to worry about NIB anymore.....

what exactly does that mean?

Importing without being the official Stern distributor in Australia. The official Stern distributor in Australia is AMD.

We have one Stern distro in Australia. The guy who made that video was buying games from another distro in the USA and importing them in to Australia and selling the games NIB himself. By passing the Aust distro that pays for the privelidge.

Some people have a checkered history......

Having one distro for an entire country seems a bit sketchy to me? Or is that typical?

Curiously a lot of pages that used to exist on Stern's website are no longer available... e.g. https://sternpinball.com/find-a-commercial-distributor, https://sternpinball.com/buy/commercial-distributors

only 24 million people here, how many distributors in the UK

I know of at least 2 official ones. Hard to say for sure since Stern have pulled the distributor page. I can't find it anywhere on their website anymore.

EDIT: I might be thinking of retailers. There's at least 3 retailers, and it seems Electrocoin appears to be the exclusive distributor in the UK, so perhaps the Aussie situation isn't unusual.

Should have kicked up about that freight expense in hindsight.

ACL states the retailer must cover transport costs or the retailer must collect it themselves at their expense in return claims when the item is too large and it would be unreasonable for the consumer to bear the cost of returning it.

Don't forget the key part. He was selling them for below AMD pricing and still turning a profit on each unit sold to the end consumer.

Aussie pinball scene is a golden goose for Stern given retail versus wholesale.

You might be thinking of an agent versus a distributor. We have one distro and two agents for Stern.

Key point being is that agents cannot set or sell their retail NIB price below AMD distros so if you are buying from any "authorised" Stern distribution channel in Australia it is the equivalent of supporting a price fixing monopoly.

If the cpu chip is failing alot, couldn't the board be re-designed to have a socket for that chip? Seems that would help in repairing the board. Even if you have to buy a pre-programmed chip from Stern, at least you could change out the chip yourself.

There is no reason for a micro to fail, if it is failing its being damaged by over voltage or emi (from coils / motors) or something on the board due to bad design. The design should be fixed not just making bits socketed

But it should have jtag or serial to recover from failed flash update

Yeah firmware should be doing some sort of checksum first before it swaps to the new flash else does not copy it into program memory.

So SPIKE is now going into 5 years' production for standard machines, and might be considered 7-8 years if you count "The Pins". Both timeframes have historic precedent as a complete run for a pinball platform. SAM was approx. 8 years. Whitestar about the same. B/W platforms generally went roughly 5 years or so from System 6/7 to System9 /11 to WPC to WPC 95 and so on.

When SPIKE was developed, LED bulbs were the "new" thing and since then we've seen widespread adoption of LCD/HD video, better sound, more complex light shows and feature integration... How much more overhead is available in SPIKE to drive now-common (or future) enhancements and innovations? After all, someone pointed out that PC_based platforms are driving most of Stern's most compelling competition. There must be a reason.

Anyone think Stern is readying the successor to SPIKE, and the long-delayed release of schematics signals its end of life ("We're done here so here you go, have fun...")? Perhaps Stern has something larger in the works. I mean they'd have to, right... but maybe it's more imminent than we think...?