The backglass on this Bally Joust was in poor shape. Every basic portion of the translucent artwork had flaked ink, as well as the word “Joust,” the numbers “1” and “2” can play, the word “Bally,” all but one of the match numbers, “1” ball in play number, and “Game Over,” “1st Player,” “2nd Player,” and the white areas around the score reels for both players. Very unpresentable, as far as I’m concerned.

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The backbox showed evidence of the extensive ink flaking.

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I put masking tape on the front of the backglass to show where the score reel windows go. I learned to do this the hard way on an earlier backglass restoration. This will come in very handy later.
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I then proceeded to use an exacto-type knife to carefully scrape off non-artwork translucent areas. Ironically, I started with “Game Over.”

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Then on to the pin’s title. This one took quite a while. (The word “Bally” was too rounded and intricate for my comfort level to scrape. It will be taken care of later with the artwork.)

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Now on to the white areas around the score reels. The masking tape on the front remains as a guide for later on.

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Then I did the number of players. First I scraped off the numbers themselves.

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The translucent purple circular areas around these numbers had a bunch of flaking as well. I decided that the best way to take care of that was to touch up those areas with craft paint and then cover them with grey paint. This would allow the numbers themselves to be translucent (as they must be), but the now flake-hole-free purple circular areas will be opaque.

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The “1” for ball in play was flaked, so it also got scraped.

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Some of the black border around “Joust” letters also got scraped off, so I went back and touched up the most noticeable areas with black craft paint.

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I had been debating over what to do with “1st Player” and “2nd Player,” which were also flaked. Even though those numbers and letters are fairly intricate, they serve to let the players know whose turn it is and need to be translucent to do so. I could have filled in the flaked-off spots with white craft paint with a brush, but translucent areas can look really bad and noticeable when touched up like that. So I decided to go ahead and scrape those areas off as well. I carefully went to work, and it came out quite well.

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I also again used black craft paint to touch up more noticeable areas where black border had also been scraped off.

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Now on to airbrushing these non-artwork scraped-off translucent areas. I started with the “1” and “2” can play. For each area to be airbrushed, I first mask off surrounding areas. I only stick yellow sticky notes to the backglass itself. These are only stuck on opaque areas (i.e., grey-coated areas), which are much more resistant to damage from the low-tack sticky notes than opaque areas. I often use the stickies to “tape” down sheets of plain paper to cover larger areas. Then I use masking tape to stick paper or cardboard to those sticky notes or the paper.

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Time to break out the Harbor Freight airbrush.

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On my previous backglass airbrushing, I had used Createx “Airbrush Colors.” That paint has to be set with heat. On that prior backglass I used a blow dryer to set the paint, but I was constantly concerned about cracking the backglass. That backglass turned out fine, but this time I didn’t want to risk it. So I used Createx “Wicked Colors,” which don’t require heat to set. I had difficulty getting the paint to flow freely through the airbrush, but I managed to cover the areas to be colored. (I didn’t realize until later that, unlike the “Airbrush Colors” I used before, the “Wicked Colors” should be thinned with Createx reducer to work better with my airbrush.)

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On to the “1” ball in play. The unreduced “Wicked” paint flowed fine for this one.

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Then I airbrushed “Game Over” and “Joust.” I had difficulty getting the paint to flow again on these, but managed to cover the entire areas.

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Now to finish the airbrushing with white. I needed to use white on the areas around the score reels and on the “1st Player” and “2nd Player,” which are all white. I also covered with white the rest of the airbrushing I had done, to soften the light coming through these translucent areas, just as all the translucent areas were backed with white ink originally. By this point I had learned to thin the “Wicked” paint with Createx reducer, so the white paint flowed freely through the airbrush. Also, the masking tape I had put on the front of the backglass so long ago now allowed me to locate yellow sticky masking for the score reel windows.

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On a previous backglass, I thought I had been too sparse with the white airbrush paint, so this time I put on more. In fact, this time I was too heavy with the white. The areas covered are still translucent, so I planned to use brighter LEDs in these areas to make up for this.
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Now I sealed up the entire backglass with Krylon Triple Thick, first using pieces from the sticky part of yellow sticky notes to mask the score reel and credit reel windows and low-tack painter’s tape to mask off the tight-fitting metal backglass frame.

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I brought the backglass inside and touched up the artwork with craft paint. There were so many colors and so many flaked-off spots to fill that this was a big job. I used paint directly from the bottle when I thought one of the many paints I have was close enough color-wise, but I still had to mix a couple colors. I spent a lot of time shining a flashlight from below while painting with a brush from above. I didn’t “nail” the colors, but I thought all but one were fairly close. The exception was a dark purple on the outfit of the rightmost man between the score reels (leftmost when looking from the back as in the photo), which turned out too light. But it doesn’t “hit you” when you generally look at the backglass. All in all, I think the colors worked pretty well.

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Translucent areas can look pretty bad when touched up with dabbed-on craft paint, especially with the amount of touch-up on this one. A compromise solution is to make the touched-up areas opaque by covering them thickly with grey paint. Although that would mean making all the artwork on this backglass opaque, I think that was the best solution. So I started by heavily dabbing on lots of grey paint brushload by brushload from the small craft paint bottle. This was an extremely slow process, and generally multiple coats of grey are required to keep light from shining through.

After spending a considerable amount of time putting one thick coat on the relatively small amount of artwork on the upper half of the backglass, I switched to a faster method. I bought several bottles of the grey craft paint. Then I poured an entire bottle into a larger container, and used a sponge craft paint roller or a sponge brush to quickly apply a thick coat over all the remaining artwork. I repeated that process several times, letting the paint dry between coats. (I found the simple sponge brush did a better job of covering than the roller.)

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With the myriad flaked-off spots to fill with many different colors of paint, I discovered that I had missed covering a small number of spots with colored paint, which allowed the grey opaquing paint to show through. The two main areas showing these grey spots are in one of the knight’s lances and the back/shoulder area of the fallen knight. The lance grey spot is in a “busy” area and doesn’t really draw attention, and the other looks a little like some mud that could have gotten on the fallen knight. I’m showing close-ups, but they really don’t detract much if any from the way the backglass looks as a whole.

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Here’s the end result. The glass has gone from unpresentable to presentable, preserving the original glass. The non-thinned airbrushed paint isn’t perfectly uniform, which is most visible in the word “Joust.” However, I think it gives that word a kind of “Olde English” look that fits the artwork. Even this imperfect airbrushing is far better than the previous flaked areas. I purposely left the touched-up match numbers translucent in case someone ever wanted to turn on the number match, even though the numbers wouldn’t look great. My plan was not to use the number match. As I mentioned earlier, I would use brighter LEDs in the airbrushed areas to compensate for the thickness of the airbrushed paint in this case.

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Thanks!

Backglass work can definitely take a lot of time! What I did took many hours of work. Thankfully, I find it quite rewarding.

There are many ways to go about it. I’ve had good success with the method I’ve come up with, but it definitely can be done other ways. Thanks for sharing!