Big Deal pinball restore

gameguy1957

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A few days ago this went from what I thought was going to be a couple of weekends worth of project to a full-on refurbish.

I found out that a critter had been in the back of it for a while, so I'm going to have to replace the bottom of it and sanitize all of the mechanical parts on the board in the bottom of the cab.

The previous posts up to this point are here -

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=218838
 
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Here are some shots of the playfield as I'm adding paint to it. The orange and green paint don't look too close to the original under the camera flash, but they are actually almost identical. The teal looking color is way off, so I'm going to have to dig around for a better color or mix something.
 

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I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to mask anything, or it would pull up paint (been there!), but if you can... I highly recommend getting the Testors Lacquer little spray can (NOT enamel), mask each of the teal areas, and spray them as a whole. No issue of color matching that way. I think there's a good teal in that line.

good luck!
 
Yea, spray painting would be nice, but as fragile as the original paint is then I think the tape would lift anything under it. The bad thing about it is that the original paint didn't have that much wear and would have been nice if it wasn't exposed to the climate for so long.

I do a fairly good job at freehanding stuff, but there are hundreds of small cracks with tiny specks of paint flaked out of them. I actually have to push paint into those, which is taking some time. If it wasn't for that then it wouldn't be too tough of a job.

If I can get it decent looking then I'm going to put several coats of clear on it to level things out and hopefully glue everything down.

-JM
 
Okay, moving on to a different problem. Since some sort of animal lived in the machine for a while I needed to clean and sanitize the inside of the machine.

I pulled the bottom board, cleaned everything, and have the parts moved back to the board. They are not installed yet since I have to remove some parts to disassemble and clean.

On the pic of the bare board you can see thet there was still some busted glass, dirt, and some urine stains that the shop-vac didn't get. I also removed a turd, but figured I didn't need a pic of it.
 

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Ahh love the animal nest games. I have one of those now that's on the restoration list my ball bowler. Wonder what I'll find in there. Interested to see the final results of this sweet machine...good luck...
 
Here's an update on this machine now that the monsoon-like rain has stopped and the heat and humidity are low enough to work on stuff outside again.

I think I'm going to need one more sanding and coat of clear to make it perfectly smooth. The paint looks decent enough except for the white and the worst of that is covered by plastics.

It might not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but the ball will roll smoothly across it.

Once I let the final coat settle and sand/buff it out I'll start reassembling it.
 

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Here's an update on this machine now that the monsoon-like rain has stopped and the heat and humidity are low enough to work on stuff outside again.

I think I'm going to need one more sanding and coat of clear to make it perfectly smooth. The paint looks decent enough except for the white and the worst of that is covered by plastics.

It might not be the most beautiful thing in the world, but the ball will roll smoothly across it.

Once I let the final coat settle and sand/buff it out I'll start reassembling it.

A lot of the pro restoration guys claim the best way to do this is to lay some clear down, then do the touch up/repaint over that, then of course clear over it all at the end.. I would suggest that you pick up the Testors "Lacquer" little spray can of wimbledon white I think it is, and mask/respray the white areas if you can, then clear it again. That is, if it won't pull up your clear and original finish.
 
I'm going to give the yellowed white a go on another playfield for another machine. At this point I'm tired of working on this one and you can only polish a turd so much before it stops being fun.

This one at this point has a flat playing surface and color in most of the area you can see. So if I can get it playing in the next few weeks then I'm going to consider the project a success.

I also got plenty of practice on playfield work and will be prepared for doing some of the better ones waiting in the queue.

- JM

A lot of the pro restoration guys claim the best way to do this is to lay some clear down, then do the touch up/repaint over that, then of course clear over it all at the end.. I would suggest that you pick up the Testors "Lacquer" little spray can of wimbledon white I think it is, and mask/respray the white areas if you can, then clear it again. That is, if it won't pull up your clear and original finish.
 
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