I think the clear coat craze has us... like the matrix. We want no dimples, no damage after playing the machine for 20 years, yet we scream bloody murder when the seemingly 1/4” thick clear coat starts chipping around the edges. Well then just put the mylar down and forget the CC stupidity, or better yet, let them dimple and chip and keep right on playing, because a machine that “plays a game for the amusement of the player in exchange for some spare pocket change” is all this thing has got to really do, and you will find all these “good faith” remedies and remediations about playfields are just to silence the loudest squeaky wheels, because operators are not giving two shits the playfield is disentigrating around the star posts... now when the area in front of the flippers starts ripping off in strips, then they might bitch, but all the HUO collectors who are looking to keep pristine copies of these titles and play only 1 game a month on them are going to kill the resurgence of pinball if what they expect these things are going to do is anything other than fall completely apart as we play them. I stopped looking at my playfield damage the day I bring them home, because I know from here on out, the damage is going to be minimal in my HUO collection, and every flaw and dent is not a crack in the dyke that is going to get unbelievably bigger if I do nothing about it. Does the start button work? Flippers work? Coils work?, switches work?, plunger work? Does it keep score and take money? Then what’s the problem with it? Yeah these machines cost a fortune, you want them to be right when it rolls through the door, but expecting it to stay that way is ludicris thinking, imo. Lets slow this crazy train down a few clicks and take a breather, then discuss the reason star posts were conic in the first place, had three on every sling plastic for years, and hear comes jumpin Jack Flash and his JJP gas and now we have more issues. How about the issue of the newer silicone rings? I think there are more factors at play here, ring tension, mechanical advantage of a conic star post verses straight, the loss of the third post being stabilized by sling plastic, thicker clear coats, different compositions, bad qc on post bottoms, change in post shape and size. When you look at the collection of posts and vertical things penetrating the play field over the decades of pinball development and we have come up with all kinds of ways to secure things to a play field. I believe the confluence of post design changes, increasing clearcoat thicknesses, change in clear coat compositions,qc issues and owner expectations have sent us into this frenzy. I’m praying that CGC has got it right on my MB, but who knows?

Has anyone thought to cut the clear down to the wood, remove the clear off the wood, bevel the edge then use epoxy to fill in the void and create a hard pad that locks the CC edge down and lets the post sit at original height, no adjustments needed? The epoxy could also be replaced with a polyester resin maybe, but either way, you use a harder clear “filler” that doesn’t deform under pressure as bad as the original CC? If I have a NIB sling do this to me in the future, I might try it on a single post and see what happens.

No dog in this race, but an observation from past experience... TL;DR

I think there may be a problem with the DTS digital printing and the proces of adding clear on top of it. When I worked at Grimes Aerospace, we were using an aerospace developed, hi temp silicone clear base infused with transparent colorants, which were either specfic pigmented material being locked into the matrix, or, if it was a chromatic dye, one that changed the spectral absorbtion of the actual clear base, but either way, they disrupted the adhesion process to the substrate material. If faced with trying to figure this out, I would say they need to look at the bonding strength of the artwork layer, the bonding strength of clear coat to the artwork layer, and the change in density across the layers. When the clear is bonded over the artwork layer, this “system” now has to rely on the bond strength of the pigmented artwork layer to the wood substrate for ALL of it’s mechanical bonding properties. Now at first, the clear is flexible, not fully cured, meaning all the chemicals in the clear coat preventing complete cross-linking of the long chained molecules has not vaporized yet. The physical force of the posts sharp edges provides the proper “preload” and as the clear finally cures to a hardened state, there are forces in the mix that intensify the strain on the wood/artwork bond, and when it fails, the resulting delamination spreads from the point of the force causing the clear coat deformation. Anyone serious about solving this issue needs to look at this as a system, not as individual processes that may or may not have a big contributing factor to the phenomena. This would require at least 4 to 5 months of R&D to totally understand all the variables and how to control them, and I don’t see a pinball manufacturer spending that kind of time and money to figure this out, unless your entire company reputation rested on it... the scientific method works, but it ain’t cheap.

I love this game... who has one for sale under $5500 yet?