Loving this thread. I have two Dragonfists in my basement waiting for full restorations. Plus a third backglass...

Why Dragonfist? No idea. It just seems like they keep coming into my life.

How many of the light sockets did you have to replace? I have only dived into one of mine and I have probably swapped half of them. Still have issues with most of the rest. Especially that nine bulb common ground part.

That plastic crack in the corner happened lifting the playfield, didn't it? I hate when plastics are up against the side wood like that.

Whoa, wait a second. Where did that center drain post come from? That totally changes the difficulty of the game. The biggest threat in Dragonfist is a center drain coming down from the left orbit. That will never happen with a center post.

The gap between that post and the tip of the flipper is barely bigger than the ball!

Heh. That is someone's mod to make the game WAY EASIER. If you leave it like that someone good at the old Sterns will roll the game multiple times. I suppose you could leave it and make the tilt super sensitive, though. Just sensitive enough that the slingshots don't tilt but anything more will.

Watch the drain at 1:13 of that video. The gap between the center post and the flipper is so small all someone has to do is nudge the game every time a center drain is a threat and they'll reduce that drain from the majority to single digit percentage. That's like an eighth of an inch clearance on either side. You might be able to tap pass on that game without using the flipper.

I have two of them, actually, and neither has a hole for the post.

My (14 year old) son and I are both B division level players and on a good night we'll average around 450k. I think my high is about 850k. Most of my drains come from helplessly watching the ball come down the left orbit and straight down the middle. Put a post in there and that would pretty much never happen because with a moderate tilt you can nudge that post to the right far enough to catch nearly all of those orbit drains.

Can anyone actually confirm that some came from the factory this way and they are not user mods?

We like the game quite a bit. Given it's place in history as the last real Classic Stern, its low production numbers and the super low market value, we figured it's a really good one to target as our entry into deep game restoration. I actually have three backglasses. One is really nice and the other two I'd call C+. They can be touched up but have seen better days. I'm hoping as part of the process to get a really good scan of the nice one and send it up to John Greatwich for his direct ink work. Maybe the playfield too if I can find a way to get it scanned. And I'm probably going to make a couple of plastic sets once I get into it because the same couple of plastics is broken on every Dragonfist I've seen.

I'd love to play one with a post at some point. My biggest challenge in this game is that SDTM from the left orbit... take that away and it would almost feel like a totally different game.