Top 5 Reasons to Cover Your Pinball Machine Glass

Some of the companies that built these games are long gone. Others are busier now than they've ever been. Either way the games outlast whoever owns them, so looking after one isn't really maintenance. It's just your turn with it.

The glass gets left out of that. You look straight through it instead of at it, so it never occurs to anyone to protect it. Here are five reasons to.

1. Dust and pet hair

Dust settles on the glass every day whether you play or not, and eventually you wipe it off. Wiping dusty glass is how glass gets scratched. You're dragging a cloth across a layer of grit, and grit is harder than it looks. Pet hair drags along whatever it's already collected.

Say you're on the game every night after work. Good. That's still a couple of hours, and dust doesn't take the other twenty-two off out of respect. Do that weekly for three years and the scratches aren't from any one incident. They're from you, cleaning, carefully, the whole time. And they don't go anywhere. You see them every time the light catches the glass, for as long as you own it.

If a tool ever does go down on it, tempered glass doesn't crack politely. It lets go all at once and you'll be vacuuming little cubes out of the ball trough for the rest of the day. A cover's no guarantee there, but it doesn't hurt.

2. The artwork underneath is the part you can't replace

On a stock machine the glass isn't precious. It's tempered, it's a standard size, you order another one. That changes if you've got InvisiGlass, PDI HD, Voodoo or Magic Glass in there, which is a few hundred dollars lying on top of your machine.

What's underneath is the real thing. Playfield inks fade, decals fade, plastics yellow, and none of it comes back. On older games it's often not fixable at all, because nobody's reproducing that art any more.

They don't fade evenly either, which is what makes it look wrong rather than just old. Pinks and reds go first, greens follow, blues and yellows hold their colour. Half the palette drifts and the art stops reading the way it was drawn. Direct sun is the worst of it, but a bright room does it too. If your game's near a window this matters more than anything else on the list.

3. Less cleaning, more playing

Uncovered, the glass needs doing before every session, because dust shows on glass like nothing else. Covered, you pull the cover off and it's clean underneath. You go from wiping before every game night to wiping every few months.

That matters more if you've paid for good glass. The point of InvisiGlass is that the glare goes away and you see the playfield properly, not that you spend your evenings cleaning it. And don't put Windex on coated glass. Ammonia hazes the coating and it doesn't come back. Plain water or an ammonia free cleaner, on a microfibre.

4. Cats and kids

Cats love pinball glass. Flat, warm from the electronics underneath, up high where they can watch the room. If you've got a cat your machine is a cat bed and that argument was over before you started it. Paw prints, nose smudges, hair down every seam. Kids are the same at a lower height, with stickier hands, usually right across the middle.

Neither ruins a machine. It just means you're cleaning the glass again.

5. They're one of the few places your own taste shows

Everything above is the defensive case, and it's still not why most people buy one.

A machine turns up already finished. Somebody picked the art, the cabinet and the backglass decades before you got there. That's most of the charm, and it also means very little about the game is you rather than the manufacturer. Rubber colour is one. A cover is the other, and it's a much bigger canvas. Same instinct as art blades or a custom shooter rod or a topper, except this one's doing a job while it sits there.

It's the rug, basically. It really ties the room together. Across a lineup it's the difference between machines you happen to own and a collection somebody put together on purpose.

What people actually use

Worth being straight about this, because two of them are free and we don't sell them.

A bedsheet or moving blanket. Free, and better than bare glass. It also slides off, and cloth traps grit against the thing it's protecting. Fine in storage, irritating on a game you play.

A fitted fabric cover. Covers the whole cabinet, which the others don't. Thin and light though, so it doesn't stay put. Brush past one and it's halfway off.

A rubber topper. What we make. Enough weight to stay put, a backing that grips, wipes clean with a damp cloth. Covers the glass rather than the cabinet, which is the tradeoff. If you want the sides covered too, get fabric.

Whatever you use, avoid a coarse backing, avoid anything that slides, and don't put a cover on dirty glass. Clean it first or you've sealed the grit in.

Daily use and storage are different problems

For a game in the rotation, get something you'll actually bother to take off. Anything that isn't on and off in three seconds won't survive a Friday night. For a game going away for months, cover the whole cabinet and get it off the concrete. Machines coming out of long storage almost always need rubber before anything else, so start with the kit for your game and clean the playfield while it's apart.

So is it worth it?

If your machine's in a bright room, yes, and it's not close. In a dark basement it's a smaller win, though you'll still clean less and the room will still look better. The game turned up in decent shape because somebody before you saw to it, and it costs very little to hand it on the same way.

Ours are made in small batches, 107 x 52 cm and 3mm thick, cut for a standard body machine. Natural rubber, so expect a bit of variation between them. Put three in your cart and the third comes off 30 percent, applied at checkout rather than on the product page.

Have a look at the Eh+ Glass Guards, or the rest of the pinball covers. Rubber ring kits for your game are the other job worth doing the same afternoon. Free shipping across Canada on orders over $200.