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Looking at the world through dimpled sunglasses?

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I wonder if that car encountered 10,000 hail storms - would it be perfectly smooth again?

Frightening.

Damn, its like I'm on Youtube and I followed video links a little too far

It wasn't released now. It was 5 months ago. The level of stupid in this thread is quite high.

People making fun of Steve's appearance is just sad and pathetic. This place gets to be more like an elementary school playground all the time.

I've been to many pinball shows and the place isn't littered with GQ calibre individuals, yet these same people feel the need to be immature and attack someone (who has contributed infinitely more to pinball than any regular poster here) based on their appearance.

But hey, it's more important to have these types post their 'valuable' insight here than have an industry legend like Steve posting here.

Please close this thread down already...please...

I can only speak for myself of course, but the only thing I'm making fun of is how stupid it is say he is an "expert" and able to "enlighten" all about playfield dimpling just because he designs the layout of pinball games. He always has done a good job at that, and he should just stick to doing that and not listen to whoever pushed him into getting in front of a camera and reciting all the phrases and buzzwords (that we have all read here on Pinside and other places dozens of times). Also, obviously a person doesn't have to design pinball game layouts or work for Stern to have an opinion on this subject as we all well know. Anyone that has been around pinball games all of their life, or works a job in a technical field is just as qualified to give you a solid opinion on this subject based on their life experiences.

It has gotten to the point on Pinside, where people are so self-righteous, that they will tell you what your favorite color should be, and they are serious and indignant about it if you disagree with them. There's nothing left to do but use humor against them - drives control freaks nuts every time. But I don't call people names (like a lot of other people have in this thread) or make fun of their appearance. Dimpled sunglasses on Steve Ritchie is about as "on topic" and appropriate as you can get for the title of this thread - they look cool if you ask me.

Also, I agree with Robotoes about the level of stupidity in this thread is high, and it all started with post #1.

I also agree - close the thread.

Hmmm...what was the point of this again? I forgot.

Thinking about the above post from Vid a bit more, I felt that it deserved a follow up.

First to Vid, I want to start by saying your value/contribution to this site is huge! You have helped all of us at some point or another with your tutorials. I can honestly say that i think you have forgotten more about pinball than I will ever know!

As for pinball companies abandoning this site, I would say we have all had a part in that with some of our posts (you included VID) see your posts in the thread link below for an example.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/american-pinballhoudini-will-be-at-pinball-expo/page/3

As for me I think anyone who has know me for the 5 years I have been on this site knows that mocking people about their medical condition is not my style or intention (see link to medical thread below for my info) I made a comment about Steve's sunglasses which appear to be Oakley's and not prescription grade glasses, I in no way intended to mock Steves medical condition!

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/pinside-medical-support-thread?tu=concretehardt

As for Steve and the topic of mocking peoples medical conditions it appears he beat us all to the punch as he mocked all of ours already.. (we have a disease and its called Pinside)

Pinball is supposed to be fun

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Steve has a great sense of humor for all his setbacks, whether losing his hearing, his finger, his......

Steve is a great guy and has designed some awesome games!! He is a huge asset to all of us who love this hobby as are you VID!

I put the ass in asset.

I just hope they don't add your name to the "where are they now" thread vid.

I've learned a LOT from your postings through the years.

Oh, he made it into the "where are they now" thread alright:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/the-forgotten-where-are-they-now/page/2#post-4266420

But as usual, reports of his death were greatly exaggerated.

I thought as usual it was just somone guessing and then people picking it up as "info."

You thought correctly.

What the hell are you going on about? You act like you need to have a doctorate in Metallurgy and Dendrology just to figure out that a steel ball is harder than a wood surface.

Steve can't talk about dimples becasue he places toys on playfields for a living (your take...not mine)? Steve can't grasp that steel is harder than wood and therefore shouldn't talk about it?

I just don't get it. This is basic.
What will hit the ground first...a steel pinball or a maple playfield (trick question).

Skimmed through most of this, but gotta say.. I have the supposedly-soft 12-ply Mirco playfield in my Met LE, and it's pretty much the best playfield I've seen in a modern Stern. Dimpling is very minor despite crazy airballs (never installed sparky protectors), no woodgrain showing, no chipping or ghosting, very smooth clear and inserts. The game's gotten thousands of plays.. to the point I've already had to change Sparky's magnet but the PF is holding up great with zero wear. Maybe they got mutant birch trees or something, but this playfield is definitely much better than average for Stern.

Need to check my WOZ, not sure who made its playfield. Its dimpling is also very minor and with zero woodgrain showing, but the clear is a bit more brittle.

Compared to these, the BM66 I saw at a show once with craters for dimples.. there was definitely something wrong with that Batman playfield.

What angle are you dropping that playfield at?

In a vacuum

Just to be crystal clear...my dumb post a few pages back was in no way, shape, or form intended to be making fun of the King. I was actually making fun of myself and how my hands always look stupid in pictures. I haven't watched this vid but I have nothing but respect for Steve. He's not just the patron saint of pinball,...he's also pretty fuckin hilarious.

The king Ups the Irons!

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That would agree with the testing that was done. Met was the second hardest Stern playfield tested, almost to the level of the "softest" JJP playfield (which was plenty hard):

(Stern) MET: 157 HB
(Stern) ST PRE: 161 HB
(JJP) TH: 163 HB

Problematic playfields were ones like Ghostbusters, BM'66, etc. WAY softer than Met or any JJP playfield. One of the GBs tested was less than 100.

Must have missed the link / thread to this testing ... can you post it?

Someone took a $10,000 gauge that uses bounce to test hardness on various materials and used it on a bunch of playfields, old and new. Obviously, it's not as perfect as pressing a steel ball into the playfield and the hardness of the clear will figure in, but that's fine, IMO, because we're talking about dimpling, and clearcoat figures. It's certainly very informative to have verifiable data from a calibrated test device to show the *relative* hardness from PF to PF and to confirm that we're not all crazy and Stern is definitely putting out some SOFT playfields relative to the old days and JJP.

If you scroll to the top of any page in this thread and look at the "topic index (key posts)" there's a direct link to the post with the results and a link to the original post itself.

You can't really measure wood hardness without eliminating the moisture variable.

Sure it was 9% moisture when the plywood was made, but how much moisture has the wood lost or gained from the environment?

Guitar builders (Luithers), cabinet makers and hardwood floor installers use an inexpensive moisture meter to read the % of absorbed moisture.

This one is $4 after code = W38WGNMD

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B073PXC64X/ref=s9_acsd_simh_hd_bw_b2Jvi_c_x_1_w

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Depending on the species of wood, a -12% difference in moisture can give a 50% boost in strength.

I think that's getting a little cray. Absolute hardness isn't really necessary for these purposes (just surfing above the "it's all in your head" propaganda and confirming that SOMETHING, likely the wood, has changed at Stern). The test with the $10k machine the guy did on a bunch of old and new playfields show *relative* hardness to each other right now, in the same environment (so shared humidity, etc). It confirms that virtually every Stern, and all the recent ones are softer than JJP, and visuals of a playfield craters on a number of the newer Sterns (notably BM'66 and Ghostbusters) bear that out.

Not likely. I'd have to see EVERY PF tested to make any kind of conclusion. At least a MUCH larger sample size of each. Not just one.

My ASLE pf appears better than my BM66LE pf, slightly and my BM66LE pf appears slightly better than my GBLE pf.

In any event everybody has it all wrong. The PF ALWAYS wins when it meets the steel ball!

Last time i checked I've never seen a group of pinballs wear clean through the entire wood PF. Thus, wood wins.

Is a “crater” 10% bigger than a “dimple”? I just want to get the terminology straight.

Honestly, I don’t care enough to check the moisture. I checked the playfields in real world conditions. The scale is off As to the actual hardness numbers, but the comparisons don’t lie. Also, a larger sample size would be great, but again, I don’t care enough. I checked a dozen of what was available to me. The results don’t lie, some were “harder” than others. Finding out why is a complex and expensive endeavor, and I did the test just to check with what I was personally seeing on my own pins.

As I’ve said before, do I think it’s a big deal? Meh, probably not. I’m gonna play it if it’s a cratered mess or not. The fact that I had two NIB pins with similar plays next to each other...one looking like hammered dogshit and the other looking pristine peaked my interest enough to check. I’m a consultant for a living, and do materials analysis daily. If someone’s chooses to disagree and says they are all mostly the same, great. The information is there to do with it as you wish. Again, I have no bias one way or another, but I decided to check based off what I personally saw. The results don’t lie. With the hardness scale being off, it may be that the playfields are closer in “hardness” than it actually seems. It is curious one of the “softest” playfields had ghosting issues, but freak things happen all the time.

Also, as I posted before, drop tests don’t mean a lot unless you’re achieving max force. Crashing two cars into a wall at 15 mph and both crumpling one foot doesn’t mean much. You only will find out by ratcheting up the force and crashing both cars into the wall at 50mph, and seeing one crumple 18 inches and the other 24 inches to truly compare. Only then can you see the difference between them. If you stuck with the 15 mph test you may think they all are the same.

Overall, something is different between the playfields. Is it the apocalypse? No. Does it make a major difference in the enjoyment of the pin? Probably not. It’s just another intricacy of the long and complex manufacturing process where the slightest change can make a big difference in the end product. Other than the data speaking for itself, I’m still going to play my pins, even looking like hammered dogshit or not.

I will play my pins, until I want to sell them. If someone won’t pay me what I want because they think it looks cratered....eh, move on. If I can’t sell it for what I want, I will continue to enjoy it, and buy what I want. I do appreciate those calling out quality deficits, but alarmist get old. There is variation in anything...if you want perfect glass...buy it, cover it, and never look at it, as light (uv) may fade the color.

It can take months/years for the humidity to change under a clear coat on a .6" thick painted back playfield .

I just measured a Bally Mariner and it was @ 5.2% (almost as low as the meter would display), and a month old MMR was 8.4%.

The inside of the MMR plywood cab read 9.2% , Yes, I remembered to change the meter's setting from Maple to Pine (I forgot to go back and read the Mariner's cab)

These were in a building that had a relative humidity that read 33%

How long would a game stored in a humid place like Miami take to gain moisture?

How long would a game stored in an arid climate take to lose moisture?

-

Question for further study:

What if a game was restored with a water based clearcoat?

All of that is a distraction from the fact that most of the Sterns (but not all, KISS LE is pretty great, GoT Pre is good, Ghostbusters is bad) from around the same timeframe are a LOT softer than JJP PFs from the same timeframe, all of them stored in the same home environment. The RELATIVE differences are the POINT and if JJP takes up moisture slower or dries faster, leading to a harder test, great. That doesn't change the fact that the JJP PFs are much harder RELATIVE to Sterns of the same era in the same environment. That's all that's being established. Stern PFs have bigger craters in general than they used to and compared to JJP playfields. The vintage ones you can make your drying argument. I don't think it holds water in this, but it's at least a possibility.

And we're only talking factory product. Not opening the restoration PFs can of worms because that's all a distraction from Stern cheaping out on PF wood and being caught with verifiable tests.

Where is there any "cheaper Maple" that is softer to cheap out on?

I mean, show me any place on earth that sells a softer grade of Lumber Core Maple plywood for a lesser price.

Honestly, Hard Maple comes in many appearance grades, but it only comes in a single hardness.

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I'm on your side, I'd like to see a dozen pins of each title to test for hardness and moisture.

But I'm not seeing the "soft wood" angle, because nobody grows any Hard Maple in a cheaper, softer grade.

It's not SOLID maple, right? The difference is likely some combination of veneers and cores that are different somehow. When I say "softer wood" I mean the finished wood product that I assumed everyone realized wasn't solid maple. There is CLEARLY a difference. You can see it with more, deeper divots, and the tests done on that dozen or so playfields lined up pretty perfectly with the observed "issue" playfields.

But what is the difference?

We can't just say "softer Hard Maple" if nothing like that exists on earth.

If the core was another wood, we would see that in the shooter lane.

If people are going to take us seriously, we have to know what we are talking about.

For instance, if a batch of more expensive Red Maple was mistakenly made into 25 playfields, we would be able to say "See? This is made of Red Maple, and thus it's softer than Hard Maple"

We would have something factual to show Stern.

I haven’t followed this too closely, but how certain are you that it’s a wood issue vs a clear coat issue?

Ding ding ding ding - we have a winner!

Not "clearly" a difference. Tests done on a dozen or so PF's tell us virtually nothing.

And

^^^^^^^

Your repeated deviation from the term dimpling isn't helping your case. It makes it seem like you're screaming louder and louder, using more and more pejorative terms to try and convince people who don't agree with you.

The only thing clear from the hardness test is there is a difference in the measured hardness. The test says NOTHING about the cause of the difference in hardness, nor does it account for vertical ball speed across various games as a factor in dimpling.

Dimple Drama Queens.

Should be a reality show. A really boring reality show.

My new Houdini has over 120 plays on it, and if you really look hard thru the invisiglass you can find about a dozen barely visible shallow dimples.

And thats the way it is with balls flying fast and bouncing all over, it is not a slow game. Nobody can convince me that playfield dimples in number are a normal thing after owing this game a few weeks. Higher quality playfields than Stern's CAN be made and its doubtful American Pinball will release their manufacturing secrets, and it is doubtful that Stern will spend the extra money to make their playfields with matching quality.

Nobody can convince me that "dimples" make one iota's difference on a PF.

The wood ALWAYS wins at the end of the day.

AP use Mirco pfs. Though it's been suggested that they may stop doing that, and hinted by some they might use Churchill - who are obviously lower quality.