Black Knight - Mylar Removal with touch ups underneath and on top?

Grbgemen

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Black Knight - Mylar Removal with touch ups underneath and on top?

Well i picked up a Black Knight last night. First thing i noticed before i bought it was that the pf had been touched up. The pin was in this guys basement and honestly it didnt look all that bad....well maybe the lighting in the room didnt help.

From what i can tell, the playfield was touched up at some point and then covered with mylar. Then later on, someone did not care for all the ball swirl marks and painted on top of the mylar.

The main yellow around the center sword has very thick coat of paint. Whomever decided to cover up the ball swirl marks felt the need to just completely slop the paint on. It almost looks as to if the person thought "hmm this would look better if i brought the yellow color completely up and over here." Along with the yellow, they felt the need to add black dashed lines in between each color(red, lines, orange, lines, yellow). There is more misc. touch ups that i still dont understand.

The good news is that all this nonsense is on top of the mylar and little by little, i have been able to remove the paint. Personally i would rather see the ball swirls than slopped on paint.

Like i stated above, the playfield was also touched up before the mylar was put on. Looks like an "okay" job but the colors are not really close to matching and i would like to see if i could get some of the swirl out.

Which brings me to my question. Do i dare try and pull the mylar up? It appears the touch ups that are underneath are only in a few solid color areas so lifting those really would not be an issue.

I used the freeze method on my F-14 and it worked out great. Only hard or should i say time consuming part was removing the left over glue residue. However, Black Knight is 7 years older than F-14 and i have heard horror stories of people pulling up the artwork when removing mylar on older machines. The entire playfield(both bottom and top) are covered with mylar.
 
ha i knew someone would say that. that would be nice but i dont think i want to dump that kind of money on a pf.
 
I would pull the mylar personally but keep in mind you might end up with an unrepairable playfield. At a minimum you will have a ton of work on your hands. It sounds like it looks like complete garbage now so there's really no other option.

From what you've described you're going to have a lot of touch up to do. If you don't feel comfortable with that it might be best to sell it to someone who wants to install a new playfield. Who knows what's under the mylar.

Black Knight is going to be a tough playfield to touch up. It's got gradients all over the place.
 
Why dont you just look for a good used playfield should be ez enough to find since there is a reproduction one availalbe.
 
Why dont you just look for a good used playfield should be ez enough to find since there is a reproduction one availalbe.

I thought about that. Will just have to keep an eye out.

In the mean time, I'm gonna try and determine how much was touched up before the Mylar. And then go from there. The Mylar has started to peel in two corners. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to try and take a small portion off and see how that goes.
 
I've taken an exacto blade and removed corners and edges that are lifting up. I don't know yet how it will hold up over the long term, but I'm guessing it's better than just leaving the lifting areas as is, because they will continue to allow dirt and debris to get under and lift up even more.
 
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