Saint Paul, MN
My premium arrived yesterday. Snuck it into the basement and surprised my boy with it. He was so excited I thought he was going to explode. After oogling over it for a short period of time, he ran up stairs and changed pajamas to one of his many dinosaur pajamas and came back down stairs to play it. For those of us family guys and gals out there, these themes are killing it on the home front and an easy sell, STERN is nailing it. My kids love it, my wife loves it, and I love it. We have a keeper.
I had a couple of issues right out of the box that luckily were quick fixes, but I figure I'll post them here in case anyone else with less experience is having similar issues.
1. My T-REX head wasn't working properly when set-up and ready for play. The head moved off to the right and then was grinding, stuck in that position. Wouldn't move anywhere else in any of the test modes. I pulled the glass off, slid the playfield out a few inches and inspected everything - all connectors were solid, the T-REX head moved freely by hand, nothing obvious. Then I tried sliding the playfield back into place and could feel something rubbing on the back of the playfield - IF YOU'RE HAVING TROUBLE WITH YOUR T-REX HEAD MAKE 100% SURE THAT THE MAIN WIRE BUNDLE IS OFF TO THE SIDE. The black wire bundle of all the cables coming from the head down into the cabinet was contacting ever so slightly with the back of the T-REX assembly and impeding it's movement. Once I moved that off to the side the T-REX head worked as it was supposed to.
2. My raptor gate wasn't adjusted flush with the playfield. This caused locked balls in the raptor pit to get stuck and not release. Simple adjustment on the bottom side of the playfield to get flush. Keep in mind that you probably want to keep this flush to even ever so slightly raised so that the ball doesn't chip away at the rear edge of the slot of the gate. It's a fine line between allowing the ball to roll out of there when lowered and being just low enough you're going to damage your playfield over time.
3. My helicopter wing happened to get a stucky during multiball. shot another ball up the ramp and it knocked the first one free but then the second one got stuck. ended up having to take the glass off. this could be one of those one in a thousand type situations where the ball just happened to meet at that perfect moment.
4. After playing dozens of JP's in the wild I was ready for applying locktite on the upper flipper post. When I went to do that it looks like there's now a nut and a washer sandwiched between the flipper mech and the playfield (as opposed to a T-nut from before). Needless to say I wasn't going to remove the whole flipper mech at this point, but I'm wondering - what percent of LE/Premium owners with this new nut and washer setup are having their post get loose? It's obvious STERN changed something, I would assume to fix the issue, but it doesn't really look like it's a lock washer, so I'm not sure if it's really gonna last...
Anyway, the game is an absolute blast. Keith knocked it out of the park again. Looking forward to his next design.
