Because there is nothing wrong with it.

Wood is hydroscopic, so it absorbs water, swells and shrinks.

Even out of the exact same tree, different pieces of wood will shrink and swell differently.

That wood was completely flat when the playfield was manufactured, or else there is no way the ink would have covered the surface when it was pressed through the silkscreen. That is why playfields are dimpled AFTER they are printed, otherwise every dimple would result in an 1/8" circle of unprinted wood.

Playfields are sanded on a giant belt sander to make them totally flat with the installed inserts. The wood is sealed and sanded once more to make sure they are 100% flat.

Then they are silkscreened.

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Now, a year or so after being manufactured, the humidity has changed and the wood has shrank.

Totally normal.

Once the playfield gets compressed with 1,000,000,000 dimples in it, it will appear to be totally flat again - just like your 30 year old B/W games.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/playfield-dimple-reality-check

Let me play it for a month and it will look just like mine.

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No.

There is way more clear on a modern Stern than there ever was on B/W.

I have lots of NOS Classic Stern, B/W, and Gottlieb playfields in my shop for comparison.

I measure the same 7 to 9% moisture content on my meter for brand new Sterns as 20 year old B/W playfields. The wood is fully dry and not "green" in any way.

I have, many times.

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STOP ROMANTICIZING ABOUT SOME BLISSFUL PAST THAT NEVER WAS.

No such thing as a "perfect playfield".

Even if I put 3 coats of clear on it and sand it completely flat, it will continue to shrink and swell as the temperature and humidity in your house is different than in my shop (and different than in CCCs shop).

It will get millions of dimples, because steel is harder than 3 layers of clearcoat, and steel is harder than the maple beneath the 3 layers of clearcoat.

Play the game until all the wood fibers are completely compressed, or sell it and buy a 30 year old game that is already fully compressed.

Again, that graining is NOT in the clearcoat.

That graining is because the humidity has changed and the wood fibers have shrank.

That is EXACTLY how God created the wood.

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Stern's vendor is CCC, the same company that did the Bally, Williams, Gottlieb, Classic Stern, Chicago Coin playfields in the last century.....they have been in business for over 100 years.

Take the tour sometime, quality is better nowadays than it ever was.

No, who said anything like that???

Clearcoat has to stay flexible in order to stay stuck to the shrinking/expanding wood and the ball dimples.

If clearcoat could not flex, it would chip right off every time your wife bangs her door into your car.

Same thing happens to cars where the primer layer does not adhere properly.

Whole production runs have to be repainted.

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And you will have problems where the clearcoat was not properly UV stabilized.

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The clear is better nowadays than in the last century.

Look at those old B/W playfield inserts and see how cloudy the DiamonPlate was.

Here we have a new reproduction CPR Space Shuttle playfield.

About 3 years ago I restored a dozen of these machines when reproduction playfields became available.

This game is owned by the father of an actual NASA Shuttle astronaut.

The playfield had CPR's normal 2 coats of clear, plus it got 2 coats of clear from my shop (This one got actual DiamondPlate clearcoating, you can tell by the slightly cloudy inserts).

The playfields were sanded dead flat, and then were brought up to a mirror finish.

3 years latter, this game has only 52 plays in the audits. It sits in the client's basement and seldom gets used.

If you look closely, you can see that the wavy grain of the underlying wood has become visible in the high polish of the playfield.

Why?

1. The wood has taken up additional moisture while being stored in the client's basement.

2. No one ever plays the game, so the wood fibers have never been compressed flat.

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Here, on the same playfield, you can see that over the plastic inserts, there is no shrinkage, so the clearcoat maintains it's flatness.

3 years ago, the entire playfield was flat as glass, before the wood shrank.

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No.

You could not silkscreen a playfield that had all those ridges in it.

That playfield, when manufactured, was completely flat.

There is nothing wrong with that wood.

The only thing wrong with it is that no one is playing it enough to smash down all the wood fibers into a flat field.

Hopefully you guys have been in the hobby long enough to know that EVERY game is actually play tested before it is shipped from the Stern factory.

If you ever come to Chi Town, make sure you call for a tour.

If it takes 30 minutes to adjust all the features, or find some stubborn intermittent problem, then that's hundreds of balls that traveled over that unwaxed playfield.

Of course if Stern did not test each game before shipping, then it would take you 4 hours of frustration to find and fix what the Stern tech could fix in 15. And you would spend a week of your time crying about it on Pinside.

You need to wax your game before you put it into service, and when you wax it, all those little abrasions will be gone.

Once you put 1,000,000,000 little scratches of your own on the game, they even make a product called Novus2 that will not only remove those scratches, but polish your playfield like a mirror.

Some Bally games like Electra or even games from this century like New Canasta have the same full plastic playfield overlay.

Maybe like a package of bacon, they need to make a window in the box?

Obviously, I did not see your playfield in person, but your pictures sure make it look like any other NIB game with standard game test scratches.

I'll bet it did not take your distributor more than 10 minutes to buff out that game to a mirror shine and sell it to the next, very happy, owner.....

Maybe your game passed all the diagnostics and did not require extensive play testing.

Nothing wrong with that.

It's a piece of commercial coinop vending equipment, not a jewelry box for a queen.

When you buy your new Ford F450 commercial duty truck, it comes with standard, orange-peel paint, and a few fine abrasions here and there. If you want a show car rub out, you are on your own.

Stern has NO competition.

There are a couple of boutique manufacturers that put out one game every 5 years, but when I go down to my distributor, the only games in stock that I can leave with are Stern.

Don't buy it.

A NIB pinball machine is a piece of expensive commercial coinop equipment (and for some an expensive toy for the wealthy).

If you are AT ALL concerned about the price, or if you don't have all your credit cards paid down to zero - seriously, don't buy it.

Sometimes I rub one out in my show car.

I see you don't buy the bacon in your household.

On premium bacon, there is a little window flap that you open on the back of the package that shows you a "representative slice" of bacon.

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The distributor did not want the game back because they already made the sale, lol. Do you really think the game is sitting in their back room all folded up, unsaleable?

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Stop buying NIB games. Your expectations are too high for a piece of commercial coinop equipment; regardless of the price.

Learn how to properly buff out scratches and do routine maintenance on a $1k machine.

There are 6,931 pinball titles in the world right now to choose from. You can probably get 3-4 of most titles for your $10k.

Maybe.

And don't try to pawn off your "Canadian Bacon" on us Yankees. Around here, we just call that stuff ham.....

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Canadian Bacon

Every pinball machine from Stern is used.

They play each one, you will see it if you ever go for the tour.

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I bought a Russian side car motorcycle "new" and it had 19km on the odometer upon opening the crates.

Am I going to pout and cry about it?

Hell no.

I'd way rather the mechanics at the factory ride it around until it's fixed properly, than to have them ship it to me with some problem that would take me forever to diagnose and fix.

If it took THEM 10 miles of dicking around with it to fix it, how long would it have taken me???

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Yes, probably played VERY infrequently.

You can always pull up a plastic and see if the dimples have pounded the playfield flat or not.

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There were a few scratches and some dirt under the fenders.

I planned on painting the bike Soviet Red with gold trim, but after a while I decided that the black semi gloss was good enough.

Dealer??? I bought it still packed in it's wooden crates.

You put the engine back in it, put the battery in it, and then attach the side car. That way you register it with the State as a "kit", because there is no way that this hunk of Soviet era iron is going to pass an American emission test, lol.

You can drop the sidecar at any time if you just want to ride the bike.

You can't ride your Harley in the snow, but a 2 wheel drive Dnepr is right at home in snow or mud.

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Satan: (leans in and whispers in Paul's ear) What if his dealer carefully took the game out of the box, played it for an entire week and then returned it to the box with hotglue and staples?

Paul: Dealers are nice people, they would not do something like that......wait.....that sounds like something YOU would do!

Satan: The best part is; you will never know who play-tested the game. Stern, the dealer, or....ME!

Paul: (gasps)

Satan: Baahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

It does not make sense, but Stern does test every switch and mech.

Here is a video if you have never been to the factory and seen the production line.

LOL, anything is possible..........