I've been meaning to compile this restoration for about a year. I am officially the world's worst self-promoter.
Back in the fall of 2019 - The Before Time - I was approached about doing a Bally Kiss conversion to the exceedingly rare Geiger Automatenbau kit "Miss World". If you're unfamiliar with Geiger's strange business model - and why wouldn't you be? - they pursued the odd strategy of creating alternate playfields, backglasses, and plastics sets for popular pinball titles. As far as I can understand the reasoning, the idea was that arcades which had had success with a given title could squeeze some extra juice out of their investment by changing its appearance with a swapped-out art package - presumably a cheaper option than buying a whole new title. I'm amazed this strategy worked at all as a business model, but there were several of these made, so I guess they were able to make *some* money doing this.

I'm told there was some problem with the printing on Miss World, and they therefore never went to market. I'm also told that, consequently, there are only like 9 functioning conversions of this title on earth. (Well, 10 now.)

Miss World is a decidedly ugly playfield design that somehow manages to be almost upsettingly sleazy seeming and a lot less sexy than its intention would seem to be. It's up to your imagination what the hell the theme is all about here. I mean, I get why they decided to go all-in on the pinup theme; it was 1980 after all, and porn wasn't able to be summoned at a moment's notice from a device being carried in every 18 year old boy's pocket. Stick a bunch o' ladies with bare boobies on a pin that otherwise has run its course, and those kids will line up to dutifully and laciviously pump quarters into it. Or that would seem to have been the thinking before the printing run went off the rails, lol.

Anyhow...in the posts that follow I'll give a little info on the process I took to resurrect this truly crusty barn find of a machine and give it new life as one of the rarest titles in all of pinball!

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So, it seems like the Geiger Automatenbau people weren't necessarily sourcing the VERY BEST plywood available...this playfield had a pretty nasty void just under the top veneer layer, which had gotten crushed and not-nice. Some of the veneer around the void was separating; that I could fix by injecting some wood glue with a syringe and clamping. Afterward, clear coat was sprayed, and eye-droppered into the void area so there would be something solid I could paint over.

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The repair work went well, so after that it was a matter of pretty standard issue frisket masking and airbrushing to reestablish the black background.

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Later I used the vinyl cutter to make a stencil to repaint the lettering and other details. Once that was done and a couple of other minor touchups were taken care of (and the inserts were re-glued using epoxy from the backside of the playfield), it was clear coat time.

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(I didn't remember to take a photo of the final repair, with the lettering fixed. Sorry...)

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I went through a similar hell last year when I was swapping in a NOS Warlok playfield that didn't have an outhole *at all.* The cabinetry background paid off...but I was a little white knuckled when it came time to bust out the jigsaw and the router, lol.

So, to my surprise, despite this thing being a literal barn find - the former residency of rodents was, let's just say...abundantly clear - the cabinet was more than salvageable. I have no qualms about just chucking beat cabinets, but this one was really OK and a good candidate to reuse. I guess it was a *dry* barn.
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I enlisted the help of a friend to figure out how to recreate the INSANE 6-color stencils used on the Miss World example the owner had found on IPDB. @captainneo, are those pics the game you worked on?

I had wanted to just dream up some altogether new art package for the cabinet (as Geiger didn't bother providing stencils back in the day). But the owner really liked the design on the IPDB example, so we copied it. Apologies to the guy whose worked we blatantly ripped off.

My pal Jesse is really good with Adobe Illustrator, but the more we thought about it, the more insane the idea of trying to do a SIX color stencil seemed. We decided to do decals instead. I have no regrets about that call...

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My GIF-posting chops are failing me. Was looking for one that goes with "gobsmacked"

That's all I got in me to post for one night, but I'll put up some more in the coming days.

I am *very* impressed with the fact that you did that in stencils. If I’d known you were the owner of that machine, I’d have approached you directly! Tell your artist friend, trying to figure out all those stencil layers almost *broke* my graphic designer friend!

This project offered some interesting challenges/opportunities. The apron and the shooter rod spring cover were super crusty, but even if they'd been less far gone, I would have wanted to change their artwork and color scheme. I decided to use a blue and red design, to reflect the dominant playfield colors, and found the Bally front, and converted the apron art into "Geiger" logos.

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I scanned the apron and the shooter rod cover before wire brushing them both to oblivion and repainting with a base coat. If I'd wanted to be real fancy, I could have used the vinyl cutter and made stencils, applying the paint just the same way the silk screening did, but decided it was way more practical to just make waterslide decals. Once applied, I topcoated them with rustoleum clear coat. The effect is pretty convincing and looks "right."

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Judge me if you must, but I decided to lean into the sleazy 70s porniness of the whole thing when it came to figuring out what to put on the drop targets and pop bumpers. There's a perhaps unsurprising abundance of options for this sort of imagery available via google image search...
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I also knew I wanted to change the spinner design. The upper playfield takes a turn away from the porny vibe...sort of...and toward more of a...what, exactly? Teutonic warrior lady with an elephant fetish?
Yeah!
OK.
So, I found some more silhouette clip art of a warrior woman and then searched "flaming sword" on google image search, and was not disappointed. The effect is pretty cool, with the black vs. white backgrounds. I sprayed one face black, the other face white, then printed the graphics on opaque white waterslide decal paper, and shot the spinners with more rattle can clear. Again, could have used the vinyl cutter, but it seemed like extra work for the same end result.
You can see the difference between the decal and the background in the black photo, but to my surprise, after shooting it with clear coat, the difference almost completely disappeared.
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Sheesh, I completely dropped the ball on finishing up my progress on this thread.

I could get all nitty gritty with the process of cleaning metal stuff and how I repopulated the playfield, but it’s nothing that hasn’t been covered a bunch of times already.
One PITA little side project worth discussing, though, arose because the plastic set I had was short the 2 slingshot plastics. The owner of this machine was able to get scans from a guy, so I had those to work from, so I had a pair of blank plastics cut via CNC by a local friend. I then started making test prints of color blocks in AI, to try and get as close as possible to the inks on the other existing plastics. Lots of trial and error. I used water slide decals reverse printed, and applied them to the back side of the plastics. Then added a white water slide decal the full size of the sling plastics. In the end it worked pretty well.

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Last touches were things like the coin door decal and instruction cards. I made the door decal to look like the Bally logo, as I had done with the apron. For the instruction cards, I used the cabinet art.

The game is a bizarre addition to a collection, but about as rare as they come. It was a lot of fun to get to work on such an unusual machine!

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