Someone just posted a pic in one of the JP threads showing pooling of the clear around the slings.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/next-cornerstone-stern-game-will-be-summer-release/page/69#post-5159955

"Oh mighty Stern you can do no wrong, take my money sight unseen for I know you can never disappoint me". The Stern fanboy pledge, you are quickly becoming #1 lol. Give it a rest.

Look at this, what's happening on a new Jurassic Park Pro?

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The huge difference is, Stern will stand behind it and not charge $550 for a in warranty period replacement with a playfield with the same issue, if it is needed.

Yes, Pfreak buddy, repeat after me...(how did you know the pledge?) lol

Looks like he was just pointing out that it happens with other manufacturers too.

Let's just see how they handle it vs. JJP.

None of this came to serious light in serious #`s until POTC. They are ALL f**ked up to differing degrees...

This one actually DOES boil down to the 2 manufacturers....

One has sent populated pf's...Not all the time, but true.

The other has sent washers....Yet to see a single populated pf sent....

I'm a pinball fanboy, not Stern, JJP, etc.

Ridiculous....Hunt down the line for an occasional Stern, or ask for a single picture of a POTC around the slings that looks OK.

Terrible for the hobby...period

Again the difference is, Stern’s pooling is rare and they make 10 thousand plus tables a year, so that is saying something. Don’t think JJP has made that many total in all their nearly 10 year existence.

Not a fanboy of either company, just a fan of pinball and companies that stand behind their product. When a company does that, shouldn’t they get the recognition? At the prices we are paying, that is the least we can expect, right?

I agree. JJP won't do anything as they can't afford the hit to send out populated playfields. I was hoping someone at JJP months ago would have told Micro to straighten this out, to see it still happening comes across that JJP doesn't care. Something changed with the way playfields were being made between Dialed In and Pirates.

I remember how a huge number of Ghostbusters LE's had playfield issues with ghosting. Stern sent out fully populated playfields to a number of customers affected. Will never forget how well they handled that issue.

Now you’re finally making some sense and we actually agree. It has been since DI the real big PF issues have popped up. Only this is not just a Micro issue people are trying to pin this on. JJP manufacturing is also involved heavily in this issue. JJP is not giving enough drying time to these playfields in an attempt to deliver more quickly. I understand why they are doing it, but the Micro PFs should have been ordered and drying/curing 6 months ago and this issue would not be so widespread is my bet.

+1 for an honest assessment.... still sad, and feel terrible that some spent this kind of $$$

I wanted to be a guy that would collect them all. Wanted to get all the JJP games.now I would only consider woz, hobbit and dialed in.

Yeah. Early Dialed In's had issues with chipping at the SIM card scoop but that was mainly due to the how that scoop is cut. JJP resolved it by offering official Cliffy's to customers and later installing them from the factory. The good news is that this post chipping issue never occured on Dialed In. I doubt JJP knew this issue would occur, how could they? The question is what have they been telling Mirco to do about it? If Mirco doesn't want to resolve the issue it's time to find a new playfield manufacturer.

I'm sure CPR would love to expand their business by taking over playfield builds for JJP. If JJP has to pay CPR a bit more who cares! JJP needs to be known as the manufacturer that is offering the best quality to set them apart from Stern. That's what won a lot of customers over in the first place. If they lose the quality control battle, as they have been lately, they are not going to be around long term.

I also wanted to collect them all. I’m not just trying to be down on JJP. I think they’ve done good things for the industry and made Stern much better as a result. They make some fun games, with great code.

Not good that JP now has same issue - even if it is isolated case.

We put up with a lot of QC issues over the years but soft clear is one of the worst.

Off comments about stern quite often? I’ve never said anything disparaging about stern or any manufacturer, I like them all. Look at my history and collection, I’ve owned a lot of stern games and have spent a lot of money buying their games...and my Jp will be here any day. The only thing I don’t like about stern games is the spike system and related to that the availability of boards down the road and ability to repair, which I think is fair and hardly an off comment. Do I think JJP builds a more full featured and better game compared to Stern...absolutely. But that doesn’t mean I think stern games are bad, hardly, they are ALL a lot of fun. I did not mean to come across as negative toward stern.

The point of posting reference to the JP pooling was just to show there is something broader going on, it’s not just JJP. Mirco does not make play fields for stern so to see this pooling on Beatles and now JP means there are some big issues with clear coating that isn’t just limited to a single manufacturer. I have stated that JJPs seeming lack of response is disappointing. $550 for an unpopulated playfield is tough to swallow, I mean how many people really can do a swap? I am not sure what Stern would do for something like this. I know they were replacing ghosted play fields on GB, but has anyone made a claim for an issue like this?

This is interesting. The best way is expensive and volatile.

http://www.pinrepair.com/clear/

Automotive Clear Coats.
The more I thought about clear coats, the more it seemed logical to try the automotive clear coats. These are far more complex clears than bought at any hardware store. They are also a lot more expensive, and were more complicated to apply. But the automotive clears were the same type of products today's pinball manufacturers were using on their new playfields. These products are far more durable than any other type of clear coating.

Automotive Clear Advantages and Disadvantages.

The advantages to automotive clear coats includes:

Dry time of 1 to 5 hours. Fully cured in 48 to 72 hours, after which the game can be immediately reassembled and played.
Incredible hardness and durability. After fully curing, can not be removed with any thinner.
High solids (fewer coats needed).
Low solvents. The two-part urethane system dries because of the chemical reaction of the two parts, and does not depend on the evaporation of solvents.

The disadvantages to automotive clear coats includes:

Extremely volatile when being applied. Can not be applied in-doors!!! Safety precautions MUST be taken!
Expensive. Really expensive compared to Varathane.
A two or three part system (a required activator/hardener is added to the clear, and sometimes a reducer too).
Can not be removed once applied (there's no going back).
Not available in spray cans. Must be brushed on, or applied with expensive spray and ventilation equipment.

Took me a little while to find this but here's a great post from CPR made earlier in the year about their playfield production process and quality. I wish JJP would use them versus Mirco.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cpr-playfield-preorders-are-meaningless?tq=&tu=CPR

"Guys;

I have to jump in here as well, on four issues. The first was the Xenon PFs that we ran out of last year. The Xenon's I cut were in no way shape or form ever going to satisfy the entire interest but at the time I had the wood and inserts for a very limited number of PFs. I decided that rather than idle the CNC and layoff the guys it made more since to actually make the PFs I had materials for at the time. The rest of the material had been ordered but the lead times on our materials can be HUGE! It just made since to keep everyone employed and the machines working while new supplies were on route.

The second point I have to comment on is our wood. I absolutely believe that our wood is by FAR the best in the world. We have had many suppliers over the years and in bad times have been forced to use the same wood as the other PF manufacturer uses all the time and let me tell you that doing so is our last resort. Playfield wood over the decades has often been whatever was available to the manufacturers. Many PFs especially in the 70s and 80s PFs used three layers of thick cheap filler wood with two thin layers of maple on the faces, something you could buy at your local building supply only with thicker face veneers. For decades most of the better playfield wood came from North American Plywood near Chicago. It used sweet gum as its filler cores and .040" face veneers. But in 2008 in the downturn they liquidated their custom plywood mill and everyone was scrambling to find wood, even Stern. We then shifted to Marion Plywood from Wisconsin who made two very good orders for us before they shifted their glues to a more green product that warped like crazy. We even tried a Russian Baltic Birch that had custom maple veneers glued to it. It was expensive and unsuitable for several reasons. Finally, the current supplier for Stern contacted us and offered to make our wood. This was several years ago now and we couldn't have been happier as they work directly with us to produce the very best CUSTOM wood you can buy ANYWHERE! Their standard wood for Stern is a good one side panel with 3 layers of white ash and a 0.048" face veneers. After many consultations with their tech guys we came up with what I know is the best playfield wood in the world. We use the same basic setup as Stern, 3 layers of white ash cores then we use 4 layers of maritime hard maple BUT we increased the thickness of the two face veneers by 64% to get a nominal face thickness of 0.075". These huge and thick ONE piece veneers are crazy expensive and we always get this top grade veneer on BOTH sides of your PF. This alone added $12 to the cost of each panel vs just using a second grade veneer on the bottom like Stern does. There's nothing wrong with the way Stern does it, as they just refuse any board they want and since they are so close to the mill, the mill just picks it up with the next load and credits them. We however are a $4000 freight bill away so that won't work. We pay a lot extra to get the very best wood they can produce right off the start. You get a much nicer product and a much denser and tougher PF. This wood is 25% heavier for the same size panel as our old wood and nearly a third heavier as Baltic Birch which some other playfield manufacturers use. I would love to use cheaper wood like some others do, after all why would I pay $12.50/sqft landed when I can get birch at less than $2.00sqft? We use the best densest hardest custom wood we can get because we think its worth it and we always try to make the very best product we can.

There are other point is that we intentionally make three levels of quality. Wow, really? We always try to make perfect playfields, every single time but in the past we ALWAYS did full spot color silkscreens which meant that each and every color layer is individually vectored with trapping layers built and silk screened one color at a time, one on top of the other. 14 colors means 14 trips through the screen press. 14! Even the slightest misalignment in any single layer of the normal 12-14 color process means the final product isn't a gold anymore. Its wood, a living surface so if the ink doesn't lay down into every nook and cranny of every square mm of the grain then its not a gold. If a single piece of dust get in the screen and makes its way into the print which is very hard to prevent then its really not a gold anymore. To screen press a playfield we could never do more than about 1 color a day just due to the logistics of cleaning the ink you just used out of the screen trying to save what you can, then removing the screen and washing it with cleaner and paper towels, then once the ink is out, rinsing and then using a stripper to remove the image from the screen, then rinsing, then bleaching the screen to remove all traces of the previous image, rinsing, then drying the screen. Then you have to coat the screen with a photosensitive liquid and let that dry. Then you lay on your full size and expensive direct contact positive and expose the whole thing to a powerful UV light, then immediately wash the screen once more to expose the image which means a third drying of the screen! Then mount it and align it precisely to the previous image on the screen press, which always involves a few trial and error hits on test prints. Add in a cleaned and sharpened squeegee and print your single color...... now repeat this process for each and every color on the playfield. Any misalignment at all, even as small as 1/64"in ANY layer and you may not have a gold, any mark from handing and small dropout of ink, and deep grain that the ink didn't get to and you may not have a gold anymore. Screen printing is many many times harder to do than printing it digitally. Producing artwork for screen printing is horrendously more difficult than prepping something for a digital print. We are very lucky that we have years worth of vectored artwork that can fairly easily be converted for digital use to be used on our big flatbed but you can't go the other way. If you printed 100 PFs and have 10 that are not perfect you had no choice but to sell them, hence silvers and bronze. It could take you as long as 2 weeks to reprint those 10 PFs. Now if you are doing these on a digital printer you have eliminated ANY chance of a misalignment because its a single flat image not 12-14 images laid on top of one another, the printer is spraying, so surface imperfections are easily covered and there is no screen to get contaminated. So for screen printing, since the artwork is many times more complex in comparison and the printing method is many times more complex its no wonder that we didn't always get 100% gold. Of course if you have something go sideways on a digital print it takes but minutes to sand the ink off and clean it up and run it through the printer once again, $8 in inks costs versus basically spending two weeks trying to rescreen a few seconds. But now that we have the same tech as others we can also fairly easily reprint an error so there will be much fewer silver and bronzes in our future.

Making the right number of PFs for everyone is more art than anything else. Playfields are crazy expensive to make and the production costs are all up front. In some cases royalties and licensing alone can cost as high as 25% of the full retail value of the PF, do some quick math and figure out the size of the check you'd have to write to cover that on 100 pfs!! Inserts can cost $25-$100 per PF due to minimum requirements of the molders. You can figure out our wood costs from above. Add in the costs of 2 CNCs, 2 laser cutters, a silk screen operation, a huge UV flatbed etc.... now figure that 50% of the guys who signed up don't buy!! In the case of Corvette PFs we had 75% of people who signed up didn't purchase as they promised! Have two or three of these happen in a row and anyone would become gun shy real quick or we risk losing our homes! I tried deposits when I first started this and it was a nightmare, lately we have on rare occasions used them again with much more success so maybe that's a possibility but truthfully making smaller numbers is the safest thing to do. Using the digital system instead of silk screening makes much more sense and having the ability to digitally reprint our screen printed seconds may get rid of them almost entirely.

Making PFs is complex, silk screening playfields is stoopid complex and expensive in the very small numbers we make but we do it because we love it.

Mike"

Also, just to add, here's a post from Vid about maple vs birch playfields. Interesting stuff.

pinball playfield wood (resized).JPG

Reading all this makes me grateful for the games I have, and won't be buying any NIB for awhile...

With comments like this it is laughable when you call others fanboys. Also you seem to think all your opinions are the 'truth'.

JJP pin owners don't need to 'dump' their collections...jeez man.

Looks like the common denominator here is Mirco. But shame on JJP for not standing behind its’ product.

I understand that sending out replacement playfields is expensive, but so is destroying the company’s reputation. I’m interested in buying Wonka or the rumored Toy Story but will be sitting on the sidelines until the soft clear issues are resolved.

North Carolina.

Yeah, hear ya there. I'm ready to go look at a nice early SS game with a CPR playfield in it instead of buying a NIB pin.

Ditto.

I thought I saw somewhere that Mirco wasn’t a supplier to stern. Can anyone confirm this?

Can someone solve Cleargate please?

Someone must know. The truth is out there.

It’s about time we gave the situation a name ending in gate.

If you believe him, then no he does not supply them...
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And perhaps a mascot or logo...

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Don't enlarge your photo to the point you can't see the forest through the trees

Fully disagree with your assessment and here's why.
1.) Mirco told me in an email he is intentionally using soft clear coat. Repeat- intentionally using soft clear coat.
2.) The ink is not adhering to the wood.

You literally have 2 separate issues occuring here. I've spoken to 2 different well respected clear coat guys and they both agreed that they didnt feel sending them a new Mirco would end well since the ink isn't adhering to the wood.
I'm far from an expert but this is like building a house. If the foundation isn't good everything attached on top is a mute point. My .02

if alot of this happens it will shut the company down which is too bad because they are innovative. A double edge sword really

I haven't seen anyone getting a new populated PF or free PF for GOTG, Beatles, etc? If I have missed them replacing all these problem PFs, please link it to us? I think the GB playfield is the only place I saw this happen, but haven't seen anything on the other titles of PF replacement.

I could have sworn within the last few days someone said Stern is finally replacing Beatles PF’s.

Not sure of the details, I have had mine since the first week they were released and haven’t had any issues and I’m over 1000 games played. Hopefully this is a good sign that I have a good PF!

That would be great news if they are. They need to do it for all the PFs having the issues including JP2 now as well.

I know someone that will be getting a replacement Beatles populated PF because of clear and art chipping off the playfield. There have been numerous other titles where this has been done for besides GB. SM Vault as an example was also hit hard with ghosting issues. It sucks to see but at least Stern is standing behind their product.

This is good then. Makes me feel better about my JP2 Prem I have on order.

I hope they indeed are taking care of this.

It would be a pretty good slap in JJP’s face if Stern steps up.

Would really put the heat on them.

Stern replaced my AC/DC premium vault playfield in 2018. It had a pinky fingernail length crack in clear near removable lower playfield window.

I had bad pooling of soft clear on my Maiden LE but stern wouldn't replace it until I removed one post and it lifted with the post. It took forever, they finally replaced it but the replacement had a new issue that stern quickly responded that they will replace a second time. I will have to wait for another run again so it will be a while. This support made me comfy enough to order a JP2 LE but if pooling on the pro is being reported I really don't want to deal with this crap again.

Yeah, I went through the ringer with MMR playfield issues and don't want to deal with it again. I know that's a different company, but the hassle is all the same to me. I ordered a JP2 premium, but have no problem canceling if it seems like a fair number of the pros have clear issues. I'm a patient man; I'll just wait and buy a HUO game with a proven good playfield. Just say no to NIB roulette.

I've been told it's happening by several pinsiders via PM...granted it's a process and pita, but they do replace them if under warranty....

They giving you populated playfields?

Yes

I’d rather deal with a process even if a pain to know in the end I’m being taken care of at no cost.

The cash grab on replacement potc pf’s that are not populated and still f’ed up is beyond ridiculous.

We need the all-knowing frozen one to tell it like it is.....

Giving even a free unpopulated, let alone $500, playfield is a non starter. Playfield swaps are for lunatics (having done a couple). For an issue that will get worse...I can see it if people are nitpicking but if this stuff is going to worsen over time they need to do full replace gratis or buy the entire game back.

I agree - I don't want to do a PF swapout where I had to remove everything.

If I had a machine that had that defect I would request a replacement populated PF. If that didn't work I would ask/buy a replacement un-populated PF and then turn around and sell the pin to someone who is aware of the issue beforehand and is willing to do the swap (and let the new buyer get the 'hopefully' free PF). And then I would get another title, or (reluctantly) find another that didn't have the issue. Of course I would take a hit on the sale, but my only other options are:

1. Live with it
2. Hope that the manufacturer replaced with a populated PF
3. Sell it for a loss

All sound pretty bad to me

I personally had some POTC CE issues from the line. Joe @ Pinballstar and Jack at JJP personally handled my issue which included shipping the machine back to the factory, twice. When the machine came back the second time, everything was set to rights minus one bulb that had issues likely due to shipping on the last way out. It took three months but I am happy with my machine now. The customer service was top notch, direct attention from the supervisors, but clearly an issue with QC line, which I addressed directly with Jack. It was my first NIB, and nearly put me off entirely. Part of the issue was CE's came off the line early and had more issues developed with more parts in them. They are now doing SE and LE first, seeing issues and addressing them prior to CE production. Ideally CE will see limited issues up front. However, I have faith that customer service will be outstanding based on my last service issues.

JJP puts out a more complex product, you will have more complex issues develop than stern. JJP is a younger company, they will have growing pains like any other. Be patient and polite when discussing your issues with them and your distributor. If you whine like I have seen many do on this and other threads, you should expect to be treated like a child and get the basic minimum customer service.

I put in an order for WWCE on the first day because of their quality of care, even with product issues at launch.

This thread may help - as I would expect Stern and JJP to reject any bad PFs BEFORE they use it. CLOSE Inspection before and after assembly. Don't send another out with these issues.

Haha shit brother those days are over. Welcome to the NEW Pinflation times, 2 month old no pool/chipping games are worth more than NIB!!