Hey Scott
Amazing work! One of my favorite threads to follow on Pinside.
Wally
(Topic ID: 280899)
Janesville, WI
LynnInDenver have you ever worked with waterslide laser decals? If so do you have a brand of paper that you can recommend? Years ago I made a few ink jet water slide decals with Testors paper that turned out well but they were a PIA to work with because you had to clear coat them before wetting to prevent the ink from running. Also do you use a wetting agent on your decals?
docquest you ask a tough question, the long and short is that I don't know because I don't have any lights that I can drive to test that out right now. I'm using two different kinds of decal paper, white and clear. I did a test with a white backed "7" on an insert and using a super strong flashlight set back about a foot this is what the insert looks like. I'd say not bad.
The problem is that this black seven has "opaque" white behind the black toner. With just clear I doubt that the "7" will be as opaque but I could be wrong. I say "opaque" because you can see a difference between the Mugman image at the top where it sits over the yellow and where it sits over the plain wood. I put a second decal over Mugman's head and that helped a little but not completely.
Hey wallybgood it's really great to hear you say that, coming from you that means a lot to me! I have to say that I am really ready for this to be done. My wife even said that she will throw a party when the machine is done because she's getting tired of it as well. Here are the in/out lanes along with a paper test piece for the lower middle graphic for fitting purposes.
Quoted from scottacus:LynnInDenver have you ever worked with waterslide laser decals? If so do you have a brand of paper that you can recommend? Years ago I made a few ink jet water slide decals with Testors paper that turned out well but they were a PIA to work with because you had to clear coat them before wetting to prevent the ink from running. Also do you use a wetting agent on your decals?
It's been 20 years since I dealt with laser decals of any form, so I have no idea what they're like now. My understanding is you still need to clearcoat them even if it's toner, just to keep things from disintegrating.
I don't really use any wetting agents... it's just a soak in warm to hot water to activate the decal, and I apply a decal solvent once the decal is applied and dried out with a cotton bud.
I have used the Sunnyscopa brand waterslide decals purchased on Amazon with good results.
I haven’t tried it but I think I read somewhere that you can just put another decal over the first one to make it more opaque. Makes sense to me. I think I might put a layer of clear between the two decals.
I also had my decals printed at Staples for a a few cents because I found that their printer had much better ink saturation than my Brothers laser printer at home.
I'm out of white laser printer paper so I figured I'd post my current technique which has changed from the first decals to now.
When 300 dpi images are brought into Cricut's "Design Space" the images are much larger than scale so they have to be resized to match what you need. Cricut also can only print and cut a 9.25" x 6.75" area. If you send multiple images to Cricut Design Center it will try to orient them so that they can be printed and cut but Cricut is wasteful of paper in its choices and each image needs to be individually resized.
What I've gone to is making a blank 9.25" x 6.75" canvas in Photo shop and then I cut/edit/paste the images onto this canvas and then add four black squares into the corners of the canvas so that when saved as a png, Photoshop doesn't auto crop to the outside of the images. Now when you bring the graphic into Cricut all you have to do is resize to 9.25 x 6.75. Way easier than when I was painstakingly resizing each individual graphic and saves money since the decal paper is $1.65 a sheet.
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The Cricut software will print a perimeter box around the graphics as well as bleed lines based upon what it sees on the border. These can look a little funky if the black keyline is thin because is sees both the black as well as the color next to it and tries to print something in between. At any rate the printed decal is run through the Cricut and it magically cuts all of the borders with incredible speed and accuracy. What wound take me hours by hand with an x-acto knife and scissors it does in about a minute.
The graphics are then cut apart for application. In this case I've got the big center graphic that is way too big for the cricut so it was made into three different sections with extra white printed along the edges of "HEAD" and "MAN" so that the middle graphic can overlay these and the white shouldn't telegraph through.
The decal is wet in hot water (thanks @lynnindenver) for just a few seconds until the decal can be moved with some force.
An edge is picked up of the decal section that needs to be weeded and all of that is removed.
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The decal goes back into the water so that it starts to lift.
It then gets pulled out and set upside down on a sheet of clear mylar.
The paper is carefully pulled back on itself to just leave the decal and mylar.
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The mylar is used to position the decal on the playfield and then pulled up and reused for the next decal.
Here's where I'm at now that I'm out of white decal paper. It's a PIA but it's all that I can think of to make this work right now. This is the "B" playfield so the mistakes that I've made on this one will hopefully not happen on the "A" playfield.
Tonight I switched over to clear decal paper to make the decals for the inserts. The clear paper is a breeze to work with compared to the white paper. If you put the white paper into hot water for an hour not all of it will release but if you show the clear decal paper a glass of water, it wants to release from the paper. I could actually slide the clear decals off of the paper and onto the playfield without all of the mylar mumbo-jumbo.
Here's the playfield with all of the clear decals in place. The clear ones that are just black lettering look sharp on the yellow paint. I was also able to put decal rings over the in/out lane inserts to clean up their edges. The DASH graphics were done in clear so that I can place the colored letters over them
I was pleased with how well the clear decals block light on the inserts. Again I don't have any LEDs to test so I set a super bright flashlight on top of an overturned garbage can so the light was the same distance from the inserts in both photos. This one of the SOUL lights is black toner on white decal paper.
This one of the thousands and multiplier inserts is clear decal paper.
I'd say that they are pretty close in opacity to each other and as someone mentioned I could double up the decals to increase opacity. In fact I have a second set of clears for the thousands all ready to go.
I wonder how the opacity would look if you printed the black insert numbers on white decal paper then used the cricut to cut them out?
I'd think black numbers on white decal material should be more opaque than black numbers on clear.
Looking awesome! Really enjoyed following along on this project. Can't wait to see the final machine all done.
As mentioned before I'm out of white decal paper so I did some experiments with clear decals. I added a second clear decal to each of the thousands inserts and this increased the blocking ability of the insert by a fair bit. I tried to shoot photos to show the difference but my phone was unable to capture the changes but they are very apparent when viewed directly. I also added the colored "DASH" letters over the clear decal index.
Because of what I've learned thus far on the "B" playfield, I'm changing my strategy for the lower playfield decals. I won't bore you with the details but the change involved adding a clear decal to the multipliers to help index the purple side decals as well as help orient the "Bonus Multipliers" text. Here's the first decal on the "A" playfield. The end is in sight.
I was working kind of fast yesterday to get the playfield done so I sent a photo of the table to Onevox to see if I missed anything along with a couple of ideas that I had for changes to graphics for the "A" playfield. He suggested adding wording that this table is a tribute to the Cuphead game and that reminded me that I forgot to mention Ben Heck for his CNC work so I redid the playfield name decal today.
As you might recall the flippers on the white board were damaged because the flipper mechs didn't have spacers under them to make up for the difference in playfield thickness so I made decals for two sets of flippers so the final version.
I believe pinball play fields are like fine artwork that deserve to be hung in an art museum. I would never have the patience or skill to create something like this. You and the contributors should be proud of the end product… it’s truly a work of art.
I double up on the water slide decals. Two layers to help the. Be more opaque for the inserts
Easier with a led light board
To quote Foreigner "fill my eyes with that double vision!"
The "A" playfield took a fraction of the time that the "B" playfield did because of better paper and better technique. I ordered some more white and clear paper from my supplier and she told me that she had a special deal on some discontinued paper that she had got from her vendor. She sent five sheets of the white paper and this stuff released as well as the clear did. No more mylar transfers, no more distortion in the release process in short "decal bliss." I ordered 100 sheets of the stuff and once it got here it took about one working day to get all of the decals onto the "A" playfield.
In terms of things learned from making the "B" playfield:
1) Use clear to set up the locations of color decals that float free.
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2) When decal paper rolls up when wet, that really helps with release. What I think is going on here is that the paper swells in the water and the decal doesn't change so the paper rolls up. When the paper is flattened it creates a "shear" between the decal and paper that makes the decal release quickly.
3) If you use a roller to press water out from under the decal, double up a sheet of paper towel and roll over the doubled up paper towel parallel to the fold. This way the top layer of towel can move with the roller while the bottom that is in contact with the decal stays in place. This will help prevent moving the decal in the process.
4) If a decal is not perfectly positioned it can be lifted and reset with water and gentle persuasion with a soft bristled art brush.
Also of note is that I made a few changes to the decals including
-change out the black print to white on the purple arrow
-added "knockout" to that arrow since it activates the "knockout shot"
-changed out the white text under the "7" to blue
-changed the text to "Admission to Perdition" (thanks Onevox )
-better centered a few decals
Originally I made two so if the printers screwed up the first playfield they could make changes to print playfield 2. Once the printers not an option, the "B" playfield (cheap Home Depot plywood) became my practice sandbox for getting my techniques down so the "A" (multi-layer ply from Woodcraft) playfield would come out as close to perfect as possible. I made a few graphical changes to the "A" playfield that I think make it better as well.
Working on the plastics which is difficult since the playfield in the cab is hand made while the final playfield is CNCed. This means that the two do not line up exactly so the locations of the posts may vary slightly. At any rate the holes in the paper line up exactly with the CNC'ed playfield. Here is a glimpse of the future...
The darkened areas on the big "plastics" are where the paper overlaps.
Thanks! It's not as impressive in person because of variations in decal height and ripples in decal edges. It's Ok but not perfect. For the next several days to a week I'll be working on leveling all of this out for the "A" playfield.
Well I hope that I've shot the last coat of clear on the "A" playfield. I keep learning from the school of hard knocks so I'll pass on what I've learned about Spraymax 2k here.
I had some edges of decals where there was a ripple in the key lines so rather than put lots of coats of clear over the area I leveled the section with wet sanding which of course cut through the keyline to the yellow beneath it. In the past I've used a fine tip Sharpie to touch up these sort of issues with out any problems. At any rate I flooded one area of touch up (that already had cured Spraymax over it) with Spraymax 2k thinking that the two part acrylic would play nice with the covered Sharpie. Instead it made a beautiful chromatography experiment with the Sharpie ink. I had to use an x-acto to pull the jelled clear coat back onto the key line which was a bit of a mess. Once dry I sanded down flat again and re-applied clear coat.
What I think happened is that there is an organic solvent in the Spraymax to help retard curing in the can. This stuff cooks off once sprayed but that solvent was in a high enough concentration in this spot that it ate through the old layers of Spraymax to the Sharpie and caused the ink to dissolve and spread. In the future I wonder if a water soluable ink would be a better choice since the non-polar organics probably won't be able to dissolve the polar water inks.
Lord willing I think that the playfield art is done so I'll let the playfield cure for a few days before I populate the top. That will let me finalize the plastics and send the art off for translight printing so that I can work on transferring mechs and lighting while the art is printed and mailed back. This project has taken a lot more time than I had originally envisioned, I can't wait to be done...
Test fitted and transferred walls. posts, top arch, shooter guide and apron onto the "A" playfield. Found that some of my pilot holes were off for the apron mounts so I had to move those but now everything fits. I'm working on plastic geometry and will set up CNC files for cutting the plastics and will finalize the art files for sending off for printing onto translight material. A few walls had to have their F360 files changed because of differences between the hand made and CNC playfield geometry.
Reprinting the walls with 100% infill instead of the 20% infill used for the test walls. I'm surprised that the test walls were in as good of shape as they were when removed since they had quite a few games played on them. I hope that is a good sign for the 100% infill walls.
Thanks for the feedback. A couple of more questions
- Do you think that I should pull the playfield red and replace the lightest color of red in the plastics with that color? To my eye the blue plastics look good but the red look flat/subdued.
-Do you think that I should replace the 100 POINTS on the two bumper caps with CH lettering? This is about the only link to "reality" on the playfield and I think it looks a bit off not having the fonts match. Bear in mind that this will be super easy to do since the "100 POINTS" is only on the surface of the plastic and not imprinted into the bumper cap.
I'm red-green color blind so I won't weigh in on the red plastics. All red looks subdued to me. If you have RGB lighting, maybe giving those GI lamps a slightly red hue may help it pop.
What if you put another Cup Head and Mug Man logo on each pop bumper cap? Kinda make it look like they're beating up on the devil. But agreed, match the font with the rest of your playfield for consistency if nothing else.
It may be the angle of the camera and shape of the plastics, but the dice man art above the left drop seems a bit smaller than the devil one above the right drops. Have you thought about swapping the art above the drops with the sling art? Further associate Cup Head and Mug Man with their target areas, and bad guys are the slings trying to end your ball.
Also just curious about the bonus ladder, do you progress in the same order of bosses every time through the game?
Kudos on all your progress. Seems like the finish line is within sight.
Quoted from scottacus:Do you think that I should pull the playfield red and replace the lightest color of red in the plastics with that color?
Definitely. Plastics in the photo look more like a pale maroon or brick red. To me plastics should always match the playfield when possible. Playfield red looks great.
Quoted from TreyBo69:What if you put another Cup Head and Mug Man logo on each pop bumper cap? Kinda make it look like they're beating up on the devil.
That could be cool.
Oh one other small thing: on the plastics above the drops, the characters have a white background. On the slings, they have a muted color background. Consider making them all white for consistency. I also like how the bad guys spill out of their circles a little bit. Maybe you could make CH/MM a bit bigger and their straws stick out in a similar way.
Reichenau Im Mühlkreis
Quoted from scottacus:Thanks, those are some great ideas! I wonder if pinball manufactures consider red/green color blindness in their designs as it it mostly a male hobby?
I really doubt it. I know with some RGB inserts I can't always tell what color they are. It rarely ever matters though. If it's flashing, I'll shoot it. I can't think of a game where it's a serious detriment. Led Zeppelin's Icarus multiplier lights come to mind, but it's a pretty minor problem.
I can think of lots of video games I stink at because of it though. For example, I can't tell yellow and green apart in Super Puzzle Fighter.
Yeah that's too bad. I audited a "User Interface" computer science class once and I remember the professor making a point out of taking into account red/green colorblindness when doing interface layouts. It was something that I never thought of before and it made an impression. Heck even stoplights don't comply...
Quoted from scottacus:Yeah that's too bad. I audited a "User Interface" computer science class once and I remember the professor making a point out of taking into account red/green colorblindness when doing interface layouts. It was something that I never thought of before and it made an impression. Heck even stoplights don't comply...
It doesn't really matter because the order is always the same. Red on top, then yellow, then green on bottom. I have seen some international signals that try to address it by using a light shield so the lights form shapes. Like a red diamond, a yellow triangle, and a green circle.
Also I do see colors. They're just not as vivid due to me having less color receptors in my eyes.
I'm like TreyBo69 being red/green deficient (despite having watched all the episodes as far as I know). been too many recent reveals where it is "shoot the purple shot", um yeah I don't really see purple. even the red and green they choose for shots, Roy mode in Rick and Morty for instance, is not easily discernible without really looking which you don't have time for while playing, and then I still get it backwards half the time. The tough one on stoplights is the blinking one on country roads at night.. is that red or yellow???
Oh, and looking great btw!
I'm a traffic engineer so this is in my dominion...
If it's a standard signal with 3 lamps that flashes one at night, then you still know the order is red/yellow/green from top to bottom
If it's an always flashing single lamp, then if it's a stop they are still required to have stop signs present.
yeah, but you can't actually see the signal housing at night without other lights around, it's just a blinking light in the sky, until you get real close. this is why I take a copilot, me: "um what color is that light ahead?" copilot: gives me strange look "um, yellow what color do you think it is?"
Today saw some more clean up of CNC files and tweaking of artwork for the plastics. I made a 100 Point graphic for the bumper caps and put it onto the already cleaned up cap for the "Devil Bumper" to see what it would look like. I agree with the posts here that the change is a good one and will remove the last traces of "reality" from the old ALI Thunderbolt.
I also did some experimenting with plastics graphics. Bord asked me about replacing a plastic from his Magic Circle and I said that I had made a replacement for a Darling captive ball plastic using acrylic and the Decal Pro graphics system (you'll have to Google that) with good results. (I think that the original is on right and the home made replacement is in the middle)
I can't use white decal paper on the plastics because the graphic would have to go on top of the acrylic. To get around this I made several backwards clear graphics for two of plastics when I was making the clear decal for the bumper caps. I applied the "backwards" clear decals to the back side of the test acrylic plastics and then doubled them up for extra light blocking, just like on the inserts. I then made a white decal mask and applied that over the clear decals to give them a white backing for color registration and this is the result.
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20211005_110537 (resized).jpg
I pulled the bright red and blue from the table graphic (see several posts before about color changes to the plastics) and I think that the result looks promising as a way of doing the plastics for this tables as well as a way of making custom replacement graphics for pin restorations. The only problem that I see for restorations is matching the yellowing of the plastic but I suppose the clear decal could be tweaked to do that?
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