I recently picked up a Bally On Beam from a fellow Pinsider (thanks David!). It has a nice playfield and backglass, but someone in the past made the awful decision to paint the cabinet beige. I decided to design my own custom stencil instead of repainting it with the original design (I know...sacrilege!). I chose to design my own stencil pattern because I wanted something that matched the objective in the game better (docking a space ship with a space station, following the "beam". A picture of the original stencil pattern can be found at the following link:

http://www.ipdb.org/showpic.pl?id=1715&picno=23064

In the next few posts I'll post pictures of my progress designing, creating, and painting the cabinet.

First, here are some pictures of the beige paint job. The second one is after sanding and prepping for paint.

--Luke

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The first step was designing the stencils. I drew them using a vector graphics program (Inkscape). After I drew them, I printed out the stencils to scale (i.e. full size) on paper. I created the stencils using a roll of acetate. For each color, I put the acetate over the stencil plan and cut the stencils out using an exacto knife, a swiveling cutting tool (Fiskars ShapeXpress), and a clear cutting mat. The exacto worked well for straight lines and long curves. The swiveling tool worked well for detail work.

--Luke

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I sprayed the acetate stencils with Krylon Easy-Tack repositional adhesive and applied them to the cabinet. I then painted them using an HVLP spray gun. I used satin exterior latex from Home Depot. I tried to choose colors that were close to the original. Final results are below (sans coin door, etc.).

--Luke

P.S. I also repainted the legs.

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Thanks Art. I was actually pretty conflicted when I was thinking about doing the custom design as I really like games to be original. However, I figured anything would be better than what it was and I had a great brainstorm on how I would want it to be.

Glad you love your On Beam...I love mine too.

--Luke

Yeah...good catch. I took the design of the space station from the backglass and the rocket design came from a rocket on the playfield.

--Luke

Thanks! I'm glad you sold it to me too...I really like that game.

--Luke

Thanks for all the great feedback!

--Luke

Ummm...wellllll....

Short answer is no.

Long answer is I haven't worked on it much due to other projects I've been working on (both pinball and non-pinball related). The On Beam is next in line, though.

--Luke