*DISCLAIMER* This is going to be fairly verbose, and pic heavy once I get the time to upload pictures, so fair warning.

Just something about the 60's vibe on this thing... we looked for probably the better part of two years just wanting a BACKGLASS.. couldn't ever find one. Some dink had a framed one that looked like hell and were asking like 300 for it and wouldn't ever come off the price. Back a few months ago, we found a Tron we could not pass on that was HUO and local to us, so we bought it...off ebay. Knowing that we had committed this huge wad of money, and that we were supposed to go pick it up that evening, I did what any reasonable pinhead would do, right?

Checked Craigslist. And there it was. A Crescendo. Not just the backglass, but the whole thing. The PF looks like CRAP, man, but the backglass, holy smokes... it's about as close to perfect as you're ever going to see short of finding a NOS backglass out of a climate controlled time capsule. And even better, what's the price? 150 bucks. Text-bomb Quiddity OH HEY LOOK AT THIS....all I get back is "Call him."

So we get ahold of the guy, agree to buy. I leave work, drive 20 miles home and we drive about 80 miles round trip to pick up Tron and take it home. Then, after unloading Tron, we drive back pretty much to the exact same area to pick up Crescendo..literally it's about 5 miles apart east to west.

Crescendo is pretty awesome for 150 bucks. The guy said it didn't work.. I got it home, sat it on the floor flat, score motor started running wouldn't stop. Manually tripped the reset relay, all good, apparently. At the time we picked it up, it would start both players and end ball properly, scoring seemed to be okay, drop targets reset properly, the whole nine yards...it should be pretty easy to get going. All the topside parts that aren't attached from undertneath are in a big ziploc baggie, so I don't even have to strip the playfield. Excellent. A few days later, check ebay, and there is a pretty decent playfield on there for 65 bucks shipped...YES! It has a rather nasty looking stain by the flippers, but we'll deal with that for something that didn't try to survive Noah's Ark...

We've been mulling what to do with this thing for months. I finally pulled the trigger on working on it a few weeks ago. Ordered frisket, paints, bought a compressor and airbrush, and all the accessories. We started working on it "for real" yesterday. Getting the better playfield done was our first task, because it has to be ready to go to clear by the end of the month.

01/14/15 - Sanded the shooter lane and trying to get rid of some of the ball trails. Wish I had taken a true "before" pic, because the shooter lane especially was way worse than the "preliminary" pic I took after I had already worked on it. I don't think I can get the remainder of the black lines out, or the rest of the ball trail, but this was never intended to be a "beyond new" restoration.. It's a learning project, and frankly, given the specific title, a labor of love.

Once I got as much done with that as I cared to do (Don't have a sanding block..I don't want to make big unlevel areas where the ball trail is..), we started working on the frisket. All I can say is that it seems simple in theory, but this is going to be a skill that takes a long time to actually master. I have yet to figure out how in the hell you are supposed to cut it without cutting the playfield. I have brand new x-acto knives...not anywhere near sharp enough as far as I can tell. Sometimes it cuts right through, other times it just makes a bunch of tiny rips that tear pretty cleanly. It doesn't have to be perfect for me, but I could see this being extremely frustrating for the perfectionist who is just starting out.

My process has been to lightly sand the areas that are being repainted, then to frisket, cut out and weed, paint, and then set. I know Vid and probably many others would want to shoot a layer of clear over the original art first, both to lock down the layers, and to give a more "reversible" approach, but that simply is not an option for me. I have nowhere to spray any kind of clear at all. So this is kind of a trial by fire. I am NOT recommending anyone else follow my process, I'm simply documenting it, and the results.

We decided to customize this playfield, and not just go 100% original colors. Decided in keeping with the psychedelic theme to go with UV-reactive highlights for parts of the playfield. So far so good IMO!

Pics incoming..

Alright....the meat.

This is the original playfield that's in the cabinet... ugh..

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Shooter lane after a little work..

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Shooter lane after I decided it wasn't worth going any deeper..

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Ball trail.

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Arch ball trail.
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Morr.

Some after pics... you can see I was able to substantially lighten the ball trail along the shooter lane and the arch path. It's it's perfect, but it's good for us. Retain some 'history' of the game without it just being butt-ugly black trails..

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Shoddy noob frisket work.

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Here's the fun part...

So...new paint. If you have followed Vid's guides at all you should probably know this, but apparently I still have not learned. If you lay down paint on something that's not flat...guess what, your new paint isn't going to be flat either. I should've block sanded this entire thing before I started, but I screwed up. It will have to be leveled out by my clear guy or I will do something to level it before I take it to him.

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Here's a good color reference from old to new.. the big flower in the middle, "Flower power", the two small ones on the right and the ones on the top half of the playfield other than the yellow ones have been done at this point. You can see a pretty drastic difference in the vibrance of the blue versus the old, but it's not "out there" crazy or anything. Since we don't want the other blue areas to flouresce, it will be a slightly different blue on those areas. The words and the flowers beside the middle matched the purple in the middle of the playfield...the green ones matched the green at the bottom by the pop area.

FYI, Createx flourescents are NOT opaque. We took advantage of this, but if you want the true full flourescent color in non-UV situations, you pretty much need to lay down opaque white under it first!

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I just liked the look of this once I had pulled the frisket off the playfield. For comparison of just how transluscent that paint really is, check out the color we ended up with when sprayed over the darker purple...

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And....showtime! We need to get the rest of the flowers, but this is really promising.

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Man that's awful lol....we are going to keep the cabinet with the original paint style.

I need a lead on a set of playfield plastics badly.

That's the goal...trying real hard to make it happen. Got a ton of pictures to add...

Where did we leave off...

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Decided to make a change to the butterfly here, both to make it match the backglass and to enhance the UV-ness of it... Before...

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Half done after...

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Masking off for all the UV yellow. Let me tell you...I hate cutting letters.

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Difficult to cut.. super annoying. Make sure you have a ton of replacement xacto blades.. =|

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Blacklight testing after the flourescent yellow down. It looks real close to the green in pictures, but it's a bigger difference in person. Also not quite as bright as pictured, thanks to solid state photography quirks, but still looks awesome IMO.

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I will have nightmares about these letters...

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Doing the opaque yellow...

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Yeah...going to be interesting to figure out how to do the blacklight exactly, but it looks great so far in normal light too, so knock on wood, as long as the clear goes mostly okay, I will be happy regardless of if we find a viable way to make it uv-lit or not. I can live with a few flaws. It was never going to be a HEP game....just going to do the best we can with it.

Fluorescent green. I don't know how I didn't take any pictures of it, but we did the opaque green as well in here between this and the yellow.

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While I am far from professional.....this is my first attempt at this lol...

Everything has been hand cut basically. You can tell the lines are not perfect everywhere, and those thin borders off the yellow towards the middle are pretty bad. Cutting thin little lines with frisket is extremely difficult in my opinion. We will cut the replacements a little wider and repaint them to accommodate the method.

My personal choice is to hold the knife at a haprizontal angle to the playfield, probaby about 30 degrees or so, and just go slow and make a smooth movement as possible. Sometimes I will put one finger on the left hand (I am right handed) on the blunt side of the blade and use the right side as a sort of fulcrum and make my own human compass lol.

Here is the progress report from last night. We actually ran out of frisket so hoping mmy wife and get some from our local art place before I get home or I will be taking the long slow route home....hoping this can be finished by saturday evening....

Blue and some white areas....

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Interesting...not worth 150 bucks to me to find out, given I've spent probably just a little north of that for all the supplies I have bought for this project to start with....and that's including the airbrush and compressor and initial supply of paints. I expect future projects would probably come in around the 75$ mark for me to do a similar playfield, and if I was planning on doing that, I'd buy bigger bottles of the primary opaques for mixing for sure.

Okay, here is some more...

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UV White is not exactly what you would expect it to be, for the record. If you compare this UV pic to the earlier one you won't see the outlines of the big center flower, but you can see it and the note lines on this pic. It's not very bright, and the UV response is definitely a subtle effect. It even has opaque white underneath the transluscent UV white to try and boost the effect a little, but it's just not that bright. Probably doesn't help that my only UV source is a single 12v flourescent UV 12" bulb for the entire playfield right now either.

Also, I epoxied the back of the inserts to hopefully make sure they don't move. This one's been dropped off for clearcoat.

Without being too crude about it, personally, I thought it looked like a vagina. Seriously, the shape and the position of the rollover switch cutout....yeah... =P

With more even lighting and the green flowers showing up a bit better at the top, it definitely wouldn't look like Bert lol.

Oops forgot the final pic without the uv..

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Ya know... I just want to point out that things like this is probably why you might want to make a stronger effort to not troll so damn hard. I had you on ignore because personally I find the vast majority of your posts to be irritating at best. So here's the deal. Clearly, I have you off squelch right now, my wife told me you were looking for assistance. The game is sitting on it's rear over in the corner of our dining area right now. Hopefully I should be getting the playfield back soon-ish and once I get Jackbot reassembled I will be pulling this out to work on it.

If I don't feel the need to put you back on ignore by the time I have it pulled out in a week or two or whatever, then I will take a look and see what I can do for you. I don't even have a schematic right now either, and I'm about to place a huge order with PBR, so I'll have the schematic and everything. I'm hoping I can get my playfield swapped before TPF.

Glad you resolved it. Back to the list for you....

Nope. Wouldn't really fit the theme or era, IMO.

Interesting idea... I want to see how well the UV LEDs I already ordered work out before we start messing with plastics.

I actually found a full set off RGP that means I now have a complete set plus a LOT of extras that aren't broken. The extra set was in really good condition, still yellowed pretty badly, but physically, the only damage at all is some paint rub-off in solid color areas, so I can scan these then work on making new ones. First priority is to get one set that reproduces the original design that looks good.

Really like the idea of fluorescent rubber too, but does anyone actually make it that's UV reactive? Superbands has not made full size rubbers available for purchase that I know of, and Titan's rings definitely don't look like they would be flourescent/reactive.

Super Bands was supposed to have it at some point, but after seeing the ridiculous prices of their mini post rubbers, I doubt I could afford full size rings.

No way. I've tried dyeing white rubber with RIT dye... if that doesn't hold, there's no way that a highlighter is going to do the trick, and besides, I don't want that crud all over my newly-cleared playfield lol.

Not interested in kludges, and the above question about the plastics was already addressed. I can't do anything with plastics until the playfield is back in my hands, and I make sure I can get everything swapped over. Reproducing the plastics or trying to make them fit UV application will be the very last thing done.

Huh? It is.

Clear is done..will get some pics posted once it gets home...not sure if we are picking it up today or wednesday...probably wednesday..

PBR parts are supposed to be here today or tomorrow!

So......

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That's the general idea. I bought a bunch of the comet 5050 5-way UV 44 base LEDs to intersperse in the GI. Didn't really feel like LED strips were a viable option given the layout of the rails, but we'll see. I have to get Jackbot together first really to do this, but that should go fast.

I'm just hoping the sockets sit high enough that the size of the LEDs won't be an issue..they're pretty beefy, and the non-metal part will not go below the wood on an EM. : P

To be completely honest, haven't tried them yet, but I have a backup plan too. Backup plan wouldn't be ready by TPF unfortunately, but the UV was always meant as a "well, if it works, awesome, and if not, it's still going to look great" type deal. We tested it with a blacklight last night and the single blacklight 12" tube was good to cover about a third of the playfield. As long as the LEDs fit, shouldn't be an issue.

First priority is just getting the swap done and doing all the rebuilds and associated junk. If it's playing and working for TPF, then that's all I'm shooting for right now.

Here's a few more...now, I know someone is just thining "Man, why didn't that idiot paint the holes?" Well..I did, but this idiot didn't prep the playfield correctly in truth because of time constraints. I had very little time to repaint this and get it done and get it to my guy, so some steps were skipped. Because these areas were not level with the rest of the playfield, when they got punched down, paint go ADIOS! They'll all be under star posts, and it doesn't bother me, but if you're wondering...that's why!

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Movin' along...no pics but everything has been loosed off the back of the old playfield now... need to figure out getting the rails off the old playfield and onto the new one before I go any further.. :\

Oh, I did test the sockets in the old playfield....the UV LEDs I bought will fit the light bulb sockets in MOST locations, if not all, so I expect to have fairly even UV coverage of the playfield.

Startin to get a bit real in here...

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Okay, so rails and everything on the backside of the PF is secured to the new PF now, aside from flipper and pop bumper mechs. I'm rebuilding and learning as I go, the flipper mechs especially are a new beast to me.. Having to punch out the roll pin and re-insert it (Which is completely infuriating because I don't have a press of any kind... all I can do is find anything flat with a small hole and try and hammer the sucker through..) is a PITA. It's clear that at some point I will need to find a better way to deal with roll/spring pins.. =\

At any rate what's left for the playfield:

Assemble rebuilds for 5 pop bumpers including bodies and new lamp sockets.
Assemble rebuild for 1 flipper.
Resolder and staple common wire braids (decided to wait to do this, as it was not possible to accurately re-use identical path of the original braid due to different staple positions and some user incompetence. )
Align flippers
Assemble top side posts, plastics, arch, trough.

I'm really hoping to be done with the playfield tonight. I need to pull out the bottom board and clean out the cabinet badly, attach a new power cord, and then see if I can fix the ball count unit. I'm not 100% sure that I can get this thing 100% before TPF, but it's such a basic game, as long as it plays well on the playfield, starts, advances balls and players correctly, resets the drops, and ends a game, I'm not really sure I give a crap if it scores right before TPF or not.

Have a bigger set of pin punches. The trouble is getting the pin re-inserted into the pawl and the linkage. =\

See what you want... freudian slip? Someone else mentioned it as well....

Dunno about you guys, I don't have 4 nuts.. looks more like a 4-eyed angry face to me.

Nope, that's a good idea though if only to get the pin flush with the other side of the bushing. Nice.

Not real sure this is going to make it to TPF..

So far issues I know of, we had the playfield mostly back together last night and back in the cabinet to put the apron/arch back on, wire guides and so forth..I'm kind of making this as a hitlist for when I get home today.. I have the next two days off to work on this but man..

1. Two controlled lamps on left side not soldered in to common braid.

2. Most lamps on bottom half of playfield seem really dim....brand new lamps..

3. "ball in play" lamps not behaving correctly.

4. Coining 25 cent mech does *nothing*.

5. Start button does not work.

6. Coining 10 cent mech in center chute starts a game?

7. Game will not score "Lit Flower Value" at all.

8. Ball count unit does not advance properly.

9. Fairly sure credit reel does not advance at all.

10. Drop target bank does not reset after all targets down, and drops don't go down all the way leaving the score motor running until they're manually pushed down.

Current state..

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Well, take Crescendo off the TPF list. Barring some kind of EM miracle happening, and EM Santa Free Tech coming to fix my game.... it's not going. I went to get some parts, came back, screwed down the last stuff on the playfield, tried to get an active game set up (keeping in mind I've NEVER been able to properly start a game... I was able to start a game by activating the middle coin chute....and it always started the game right away for some reason) so I could test play it and adjust the flippers and pop bumper switches before delving into the many many scoring issues and lighting issues....and now the piece of sh-t won't do a damn thing. I've got no flippers, no pops, no scoring at all anymore, no ball kickout, it won't coin up or start a game in any way that I am familiar with. It doesn't work.

I'm so unbelievably pissed off I do not have the motivation to work on it any longer. It's caused me to lose 40+ hours of sleep already in the last week trying to get it ready to go, and now this.. I'm done. F--k this game. It looks beautiful lit up, I am EXTREMELY disappointed.

Crescendo went to TPF. Startup sequence was fixed by Jeff Frick and Brandon Whittle...mad respect for diagnostic skills there, and I found a new use for jumpers too. It ran solid all weekend except for one score reel sticking and had to be manually reset twice...amazing. Had the UV LEDs in there enough to see some of the effect, and the pink glo-ball played AWESOME in it too!

I'm drinking and playing this thing right now. I can't wait to get some video of this beast in action, now that I have the proper PC and webcams to do it..

Bloody hell, someone turned my playfield into a VPX table! *AWESOME*! If someone can find me a download link I'd appreciate it..I'm not real big on the emulator side of things, but it's hilarious to me that someone took my specific game to model!

Mystery solved.