The #6 best selling Williams pinball game of all time is the Steve Richie F-14 Tomcat.

Even though they made 14,000+ of them almost no one has ever played the game as it was designed:

The clear coat was so thin on the game that it came with almost a full Mylar. I say "almost" because Williams left a 1/2" gap above the pop bumper (the most busy part of the game) and left the entire upper loop unprotected. F-14 was designed to be a super fast game, and all that lumpy Mylar slows it down.

Secondly, Williams used a million of the arrowhead inserts. These inserts pop up in every direction on many games (like MM), so why not populate an entire playfield with them?? Even when you heat them up and reseat them, they often pop up again a few weeks later. On most games the ball bounces around off the inserts like a golfball rolling down a cobble stone street.

Thirdly, many games shipped with the incorrect flipper coils installed.

Fourthly, the game's lights would short out against the targets, so Williams issued a service bulletin instructing operators to simply remove the lights and tie the remaining lights together to a single function. So the games have empty flasher domes that do nothing at all.

Fifthly, the single pop bumper gets an amazing amount of action and is usually completely worn through on most games.

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So I had a few people bugging me over the years to restore their F-14. They are so much work that I kept putting it off until one day I had three to do at once.

Having three identical games to restore at once makes the restore work go much faster. You put the right size nut driver in the screwgun and go to town. You load up the HVLP and coat each game side by side. You print a bunch of decals and fix all the inserts at once.

Typical playfield problem:

Note here that the arrowhead inserts have popped up, lifting the Mylar with them.

Note that the Mylar has lifted the paint off of the playfield

Note that the unprotected outlane has worn down to the wood.

line-of-death.jpg

Here you can see where the ball has worn through the insert printing and how much fading has occurred compared to under the star posts:

left-kicker.jpg

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Note here the deep hole dug under the spinner:

spinner-distruction.jpg

Here is the upper loop with wear down to bare wood.

Note empty hole where lighting wires have been cut out as per service bulletin.

upper-before.jpg

Here is a detail where you see the inserts have all popped, lifting the Mylar and pulling the paint from the playfield:

lift.jpg

All three games had bumper bodies with holes worn right through them:

bumper-body.jpg

How much color fade in a 25 year old Star Post?

star-post.jpg

If you've never taken a bumper apart, this is what the body should look like:

new-body.jpg

I'll say maybe. My plate is pretty full right this moment with games, but maybe in a month or two.

Here is a shot of the gloss of a clear coated playfield

456-bank.jpg

Here is the Left Kick area after clear coating. Compare to the second picture in this post.

Left-Kick.jpg

Here is upper fixed:

upper-TOM.jpg

You are welcome.

Believe me, with 3 playfields full of worn off insert printing, I was an inch away from just having a silk screen burned and completely re-screening the black on all of them.

Now that a bunch more people want their playfields fixed too, I should have done just that - who knew? LOL.

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Here is upper loop.

Filled in the holes, sanded level and sprayed a new coat of black.

upper-loop.jpg

Spray Can clears take too long to shoot between coats, and don't "flow" flat. They can take weeks to cure hard enough to buff out. Water Based Cans dry fast but leave very little solids behind, so it might take 9-10 coats to equal the protection of 3 coats of 2 part Urethane.

2 part Urethane coats are sprayed 8 minutes apart, so in under a half hour you have 3 very level coats of protection. The Urethane coatings are so glossy, that if nothing drifts into the spray booth and lands in the finish, you don't even have to buff the playfield out.

Of course the 2 part Urethanes are ultra toxic, so you need to wear a chemical respirator. Don't be fooled into thinking that a disposable dust mask is going to keep you alive.

Also Urethane cures very hard, so you need to sand out any imperfections within the first day. If you wait a few days, the Urethane is so hard that it becomes very difficult to wet sand.

Another consideration is that Water Slide Decals will be destroyed by 2 Part Urethane (2PU) if you come in too "hot" with the spray gun.

Feather an almost dry first and second run over the Decals about 5 minutes apart.

Give these two coats about 10 minutes to cure and then go ahead and shoot the entire playfield with your normal 3 coats.

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I once tried to use a Water Based Can coat on the Decals first, then shoot a normal coat of 2PU. The Decals still wrinkled, so I assume that the Water Based Can coating is too porous to offer any protection - or that 48 hours was not enough time for the Water Base to actually cure.

That's funny, because I know of another guy that has two in his garage buried under a pile of junk.

He says both are out of order. I hate to see the battery damage....

You guys have been emailing me about the deep wood wear under the spinner.

This was the picture with the least glare, from the game that had it the worst:

spinner-repair.jpg

Sorry about no updates for a while.

Here is one of the games reassembled. We were playing it last night - OMG is it fast without the Mylar.

The customer wanted to try the new Cointaker Premium 2 LED, NON-GHOSTING LEDs as the GI lighting. The new LED's have a clear cap that looks perfect for defusing the light out the sides of the lamp. About 5 of the caps were broken off when the LEDs arrived, so I glued them back on with Crazy Glue. The LEDs are supposed to not strobe and indeed, at least on F-14, you can play in total darkness and not have the ball look like it's in a disco. I'm going to have to order some and try them in a super strobbing game like WH20.

playfield.jpg LED2.jpeg

PM me and I'll do yours too.

Did you lose a lot of playfield paint when you pulled it up?

On some of the machines, the rising inserts had already lifted the playfield paint under the Mylar (see pic). A few tiny flecks of blue seem to always come up with the removal of the kicker Mylar. Otherwise, only the insert paint came up.

Second, how necessary is clear coating afterwards? Will regular cleanings and waxings in a HUO setting be sufficient?

F-14 playfields need more than just wax once the Mylar has been removed.

They had almost no clearcoat (thus the factory Mylar), and F14 is a brutal, fast game.

You can still buy the pre cut Mylar, but it misses many important areas of the playfield.

Send your playfield out for a real clear coat.

lift.jpg

And it should.

You need to be organized before an underside teardown.

Build a rotisserie, take 1000 pictures from every angle, label even the things you think don't need labels, don't order parts until you have torn everything down (always hidden repair parts needed), order extra posts and screws (some screws simply vanish), get a few extra LEDs of each color (there are always a few bad ones), lightly trace outline of underside parts with a pencil (giant time saver) , find a large piece of cardboard to slide the harnesses off the playfield in one big movement.

....and don't worry if you hit a roadblock or screw something up - lots of good people on Pinside to help you get back on track.

Sorry I missed your question (2 months ago, yet!).

I know of no restore book, sadly.

The inserts graphics are replaced by water slide decals, the rest of the graphics are airbrushed.

Check and see if they have voltage.

Again, check and see if the bumper coils have voltage.