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Stern came through for me.

  • Thread starter Thread starter Deleted member 2463
  • Start date Start date
D

Deleted member 2463

Hello all,
The wife bought me GB premium through Liberty games (nice people but totally pinball clueless and the wife didn't know any better) about a year ago. I took pictures of the play field every month to check for ghosting and in June I noticed that ghosting had started to happen I wasn't surprised as folks with the same date of manufacturer had already reported problems on pinside, albeit not massive I knew that it would only be a matter of time before the rest of the playfield followed suit.

So I emailed Liberty and showed them the problem and pointed them at the threads on pinside about ghosting. Then heard nothing for a while, chased, no news. Then after a PM Jon about his B66 play field found out from him that Stern were infact shipping a GB play field for me. I decided to email Gary Stern directly and he put me onto Patrick and low and behold they are going to replace my play field after the next run of Ghostbusters are made on the factory. Fantastic!

I then let Liberty know who in turn let ElectroCoin know.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.

Mine, Sutol's and Jon's play fields (I'll let them explain their story!) are shipped to Electrocoin and thanks to @philpalmer he advises me that it might have landed at Electrocoin. So I call them and they agree to ship it to me the next day (Saturday). Then Fuc.kupex get involved and manage to lose the the damn thing for 3 days. I'm out of town in the US and I tell them NOT to deliver it until the following Saturday. FIVE times, and Chris at Electrocoin also told them that.

Wake up on Tuesday to see that someone had been at my door, and its Fedex with a large box. Of course I'm not in so they drag it down my drive way and 'hide it" next to my garage. So its going to sit their for the whole week. Luckily Martin from @gopinball is able to save my bacon and go round and stick it somewhere properly safe!

Get home open the box and unfortunately the slimer mech has been mangled - Martin swaps it over from the one from my existing play field including all the cliffies and installs the long awaited stomping marshmallow man mod! We put the play field in and then have to change one bracket as its bent also (the box that they ship them in is wholly unsuitable in my view).

All is good. lovely new shiny play field!

Thank you Gary and Patrick at Stern, Thank you Electrocoin, Thank you liberty (but seriously don't buy a pinball from these guys), thank you Jon thank you Phil @ PinballH, thank you Martin at Gopinball.

a Big FU to Fedex. And check out the marsh mallow man doing his thing!


Cheers,
Neil.
 
Credit where credit’s due, nice to hear a good story and some positive Stern feedback. They get bashed a lot these days with dropping quality and a few issues, but without them pinball manufacturing would have ended about 2008-10 during the lean years, and Gary has said previously it was at one stage a very close call.
 
Great that they got you sorted out neil.
The communication from them ain't the best mind. .
I'm doing my swap out so I hope there is no bent metal and parts damaged when i get it out the box.
The good news is at least we have a donor playfield to use for spares.
Really like that stay puft mod you got on there :thumbs:
 
I’ve had great service from Stern in the past but I have recently emailed Chas about something and received no reply. They can be great and also poor.
 
Stern are terrible at communicating, I mean I found out about what was going on not though any official communication. I think the fact that Jon told me that I was getting a play field and I told both the disty and my supplier speak volumes to how pants they are at communicating. With Chas if I need something I phone him and then followup with an email. He sent me a load of bits for my TWD without any issue. They came through but it was not the easiest process I have to admit; but nonetheless they came through.

Kenny nobody really knows what was or wasn't affected, which is one of my gripes on this; The first run of pro's were solid and I play the GB pro at Chief which must have had one of the earliest GB's shipped to the UK and it had a lot of play and the play field is perfect almost 18 months on - no ghosting at all. Dave's LE had bad ghosting on it, all of the LE's had ghosting from what I can tell, then it was seen all over the place on pro's premiums etc. I think Stern did things with their suppliers that reduced the problem but I never thought they knew what was the real root cause of it; I spoke to a few stern folks at expo last year and thats when I said to Gary I was worried about it but he said to me personally that if I had a problem he would take care of it. I think they ended up going back to CGC for play fields as they had gone somewhere else for them for some of the batches. But actually pinpointing what was affected or not. I tried to work it out one night when I was travelling with all the serials and dates on pinside and couldn't find any type of pattern other than after the first batch it all went pear shaped. I think the premiums that arrived in September last year will all have the problem eventually. I'll post a picture of it later.

Neil.
 
What dates were the first batch Neil - any idea??? Also, any chance you have any pics of the ghosting that you could share please (would like to know what I’m looking for)....
cheers
Paul
 
first batch of Pro's arrived late April 2016, with manufacturing dates of March 2016. They as far as I can tell have had no issues at all with this problem.


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