JP was my first NIB Stern. I had never dealt with a bad coil stop before so I actually had no idea what happened. It took less than a week for it to go bad. I just noticed the flipper kind of sag, and so I took apart most of the flipper and probably noticed the coil stop waaaaay later than I should have.

Now I tell everybody who gets a NIB Stern to watch for the gold dust. I think replacing them all immediately is a good call. I bought a lot of them from pinballlife.

For people who are unfamiliar with this phenomena, like myself, it's a difficult thing to look up. I just noticed it played different and I did a manual inspection under the playfield. From my experience from my other machines nothing quite lined up with a problem I was familiar with. I was looking up "weak flipper" and "sagging flipper" in pinside and couldn't really find it. I didn't think something like a coil stop could go bad so soon.