A few months ago, I bought a 1976 Gottlieb Pioneer (the 2-player version of Spirit of '76). I like 2-players at home rather than 4-player machines, because there are half the number of score reels to futz with and they're just generally a little bit simpler. So I found this one a few hours away in Baltimore. It wasn't that bad really - the cabinet was a little bit beat up, but the playfield and backglass looked pretty good. It mostly played the first time I hooked it up, so I was feeling good about it. Most of the inserts were loose in the playfield, but were only slightly cupped, so I just knocked them out and re-glued them back in. There were some nicks and spots of missing paint on the pf, but in general, after cleaning it with magic eraser and naptha, and then polishing it a bit with Novus 2, it was pretty good - except for the yellows. They were faded and kind of translucent. So I wanted to re-paint the yellow areas - a couple big circular areas in front of the drops, a place just in front of the kickout hole, and around the pop bumpers. So I depopulated the pf, covered everything else with frisket and sprayed yellow on it. There was quite a bit of text on the yellow areas in front of the drops, so I got some clear water-slide decal printer paper, and took a photo of the text I wanted to reproduce. I used the 1-inch graph paper technique around the text to get rid of camera distortion and size it correctly. This is the area right in front of the kickout hole:
1000 pt kickout decal (resized).jpg
I touched up the files in Photoshop and printed decals for all the black text on the yellow areas I had just painted:
drop target decals (resized).jpg
I went through with a small brush and touched up all the keylines, a few spots of missing paint here and there, and that mess where the ball always lands when it gets kicked out of that center kickout hole. That always takes some hours. When the areas I wasn't happy with were repainted, and the decals were on, the middle looked like this:
Next, I cleared the whole thing with Polycrylic. I filled the cupped inserts first, then brushed coats onto the whole playfield, sanding a bit between coats to level those inserts. That clear really made the colors pop! This is with new plastics and the metal parts all shined up.
It's not glass-smooth, like I see some folks get with auto-clear, but it looks great in person:
I know this drives some of the purists nuts, but I like new plastics on the thing - new pop bumper bodies and skirts, lane guides, drop targets, flippers, posts, etc. The only original plastic pieces I kept were the pop bumper caps. I make Steve Young happy, at least. I like to use Titan rubbers too, so I went with red, white and blue, of course:
lower pf (resized).jpg
upper pf from side (resized).jpg
After shining up all the acorn nuts and putting them on, I thought it looked pretty sharp. There is a large green insert just below the kickout hole that was bugging me because it was way more transparent than the original. Nobody has a more opaque green insert that size, so I cut a couple wax paper circles the size of the insert, pushed them up on the underside of the plastic and it diffuses the light similarly to what the original plastic did. It's close enough.
On to the cabinet.