I have a Beatles Gold on location at my Arcade bar and noticed a while back the first 2 inserts coming out of the shooter lane were getting beat. I applied Mylar to the area and it progressively got worse. I had another Beatles Gold prior to this one, and didn’t have this issue so this playfield does seem defective. On the first insert half of the insert is gone and the second insert is on its way to breaking through. I’m waiting to hear back from Stern to see if they will do anything to remedy this, but I don’t have high hopes.

I’ve never had this issue in over 20 years of collecting pinball machines. Also this isn’t me bashing Stern because I’ve always liked their products. I know stuff happens. I was going to attempt to swap out the inserts, but that’s something I’ve never done before. Any help would be appreciated. I’m thinking of heating up the insert from the bottom to pop them out, but wondering if I need to score of what’s left of the clearcoat to prevent chipping the playfield. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks!

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Excellent! Thanks for the direction PinMonk!

I had Mylar over the top of the area when I started to notice an issue. I’m sure the Mylar postponed the issue, but didn’t stop it from happening. I’ve got 3 layers of Mylar over the affected area now to make it playable.

I did hear back from Stern. They said they sent this to their quality department for them to look over. Fingers crossed they help me out.

They did. They are sending me an unpopulated playfield, but it’s currently not in stock so I’m going to attempt to fix this one and wait for the new one to swap out.

So I had a Beatles before that didn’t have this issue with a lot of plays as well. I’m fairly certain this was around the time they were having issues with the clearcoat on the playfields, but not totally sure. I’ll probably put 10 layers of Mylar on that area when I switch it over. Lol