I'll start this thread by simply saying I'm hooked.
In a nutshell... I am a recent empty nester, having just sent my daughter to college. My wife suggested I find a new hobby to fill my time. Good advice, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I saw a youtube video on pinball, my wife and I have always enjoyed playing pinball, so I figured I would look for a machine to restore.
I started looking at online ads and eventually connected with @ryanbrooks. I told him what I was looking to do and that I don't shy away from a challenge and tend to go overboard when jumping into a project. He suggested a Doodle Bug.
The cabinet was rough and had been painted over with latex paint. Someone really wanted it to be a Beatles cabinet.
Ryan had a second playfield with most parts that had not been painted. Between the two, I had everything I needed to get started. But the first order of business was stripping the cabinet down.
I had hoped the latex would come off and allow me to stencil out the original artwork. That did not happen, and I ended up taking it down to the wood. Even though it was a lot of work, it paid off, allowing me to find and fix any problems with the wood.
Next up was finding the paint colors. It was way more challenging than I thought it would be. I had an idea, but nothing I could be sure was correct. Locating photos of the original cabinet and colors mostly showed faded colors. I saved some paint from stripping and took it to a local car paint guy in town. He ended up matching and nailing the paint.
Now how to stencil the cabinet? I thought the paint match was going to be tough! Fortunately, Ryan had another Doodle Bug machine with all the artwork intact. He let me use his cabinet to make stencils. I used some transfer paper and traced out the machine. I thought I was crushing it, and this would be super easy to transfer since it was only three colors. Boy, was I wrong!
In the meantime, I sanded the cabinet smooth and fixed a few wood issues on the edges and back of the cabinet using wood filler, Bondo, and some fresh-cut pieces of wood.
Then laid two coats of primer and sanding to make sure the surfaces were smooth and flat. Then hit it with one more coat of white primer and sanded it with 1600 grit sandpaper.
My first stencil attempt was to transfer it to some poster board and cut out the artwork. Well, that was just not going to work. There was no way to align it perfectly or get it close enough to avoid lots of oversprays. Not to mention my ability to cut all that out.
My wife suggested we try using her Silhouette. By this point in the restore, I had signed up on Pinside and found others who have used vinyl cutters in their projects. Reading others' posts helped quite a bit. The main issue was the size of the stencil material, only 12 inches wide. We made many attempts before settling on what we thought would work best. I loaded up the stencils and headed to paint.
I proceeded to get base coats down—the blue with silver specks followed by the pink angles. But then we had issues with the printed stencils, how we taped them together and had lots of trouble applying them in the paint booth. So I took the cabinet back to the house, and on the living room floor, my wife and I laid out all the stencils that evening so I could get it back to the paint booth in the morning. We had 24 hours before we would need to lay an inter-coat and sand again, and not something I wanted to do at this point.
The following day went well, and I got it all painted and sealed it up with two coats of clear coat. The tough part was waiting 24 hours to let it cure before loading in the internals.
I'll follow up with the second half of the project tomorrow.
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Kansas City, MO
Ottawa, ON
