Addams Family, The
Bally, 1992
Airborne
Capcom, 1996
Alien (Heighway Pinball)
Heighway Pinball, 2017
Black Knight
Williams, 1980
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Williams, 1993
Centaur
Bally, 1981
Centigrade 37
Gottlieb, 1977
Champion Pub
Bally, 1998You're currently viewing posts by Pinsider Miguel351.
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Quoted from High_End_Pins:This time around I am determined to do something with the back of the head.
I looked into having screens made last time and it just wasn’t practical and even less so now.
Is this due to needing like three or four screens to be able to do it all or due to you doing so few DE's of that era?
Quoted from BJM-Maxx:I doubt they chose the colour but process colours (CMYK) cannot produce a florescent colour by mixing Cyan, Magenta, Yellow. That was probably all they could achieve if it was a printed style rather than screened. The other colour that is hard is a proper dark blue, they tend to lean heavily towards either the cyan or become purple as you try to make it darker.
Quoted from Mr_Tantrum:Exactly. You really need a CMYK+ printer that supports adding additional color ink(s) like an orange, white, gold, silver, etc. to hit certain colors. A nice orange is just one of the colors that is not possible.
There's also the difference between using a scanned image as your color source, or the naked eye. If the plastic set they used had faded at all, then their source is flawed, resulting in an inherently flawed output.
Then, it also depends on how they print their stuff. Not many uber high end printers that use 8 or more ink cartridges can do fluorescents well, especially when they're not color calibrated often. If they're screen printing, could just be a bad color mix/match by the ink computer/guy, if they didn't use the actual Pantone Spot Color called out by the original artwork. Then, there's also the fact that Pantone changes colors and names of colors every year. There are "old standards" from color books that have been the same for years, then they go and change it slightly with either a different formulation or a different name, for whatever reason. Or it could be that they picked the correct fluorescent orange and forgot to add a slight shade of another color to darken it up a smidge to match the original art.
There are unfortunately many ways to get it very slightly off. As long as corrections are made along the way, and things get fixed as better original samples are found, it's all good. Perfection is achievable, but only to the degree that these games came out of the factory all identical, which we all know they didn't! 
For the record, and AFAIK, B/W use ALL spot colors on the artwork packages for these games. From stories I've heard over the years, and from CPR and PPS talking about that whole TAF cemetery green debacle, the definite info on what all these colors are supposed to be exists somewhere.
Quoted from Mr_Tantrum:This is why you need to know the technology that is being used to print your art even if/when you provide Pantone values. As mentioned, beyond the values themselves there are factors like if the printer is Pantone certified, even if certified how often is it color calibrated, and all sorts of other factors that can adversely impact color accuracy.
If Rick at PPS could just tell us which Pantone color book is called out in the original artwork, that'd be great! I always just default to Solid Coated as that's what I've used the most over the years.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:No. The original is a mirror the other thing is a wreck.
It’s not mirrored it’s gray with some strange round pattern inside of it.
[quoted image]
That and the text is the wrong font, too thick, the kerning is off, and the letters run into each other. Plus, the outline on the edge graphic is way too thick.
This stuff is so basic that it doesn't even take a decent graphic artist to do it better than that. You could even scan the original, run Illustrator's tracing tool and do a better job than this. You're right to be pissed off, I am. Whoever's making these plastics for Marco needs to be fired. If Marco's making them for themselves, they need to fire their graphic designer. If you can't get letters right, you shouldn't be doing this stuff. "Close enough" gets most other graphic designers fired in a heartbeat.
Quoted from PinMonk:On that mirrored one you're replacing, is the text and art screened on the front of the plastic (can you feel them?). If so, CPR says this is wrong and the art and mirroring should all be BEHIND the plastic surface, which means it's probably a repro also.
But that piece he's got with the weird oval on it IS a CPR piece. Granted, it's an older piece, but it's still horribly wrong. I'm not so sure on the "printed on backside" thing either. Here's a picture from HSAPinball's site of a FH prototype, serial #2, and if you look closely enough, you can see the "double-vision" effect that CPR mentions on their site as being "incorrect". Now, I am aware that B/W could've changed this down the line to get rid of the reflected letters, but we'd need to see more examples from original games from the regular run to be certain.
Screen Shot 2022-03-27 at 2.43.40 AM (resized).pngQuoted from High_End_Pins:I like to have my parts easily removable so I make clean connections.
This has been my thought process on anything I've designed or built custom for the last 20 years. Not necessarily pinball stuff, but stuff I've done for work and other custom personal projects. Ease of serviceability is my number one goal. My only concern with doing that on pinball stuff is maintaining originality, but hey, if HEP is doing it and nobody pays any mind, then so will I! 
Question:
For as many years as you've been doing this kind of work, is there a title that you'd be happy to NEVER see again? (You don't have to name it, and most likely shouldn't!)
Bonus question:
Conversely, are there titles you absolutely love doing? (You may not want to name these either, for fear of a massive influx of work.)
Are there some games that you have added playfield support brackets to, and if so, how do you figure out which style of brackets to use and how to attach them?
Quoted from High_End_Pins:Yes many.
It just depends on what fits or if there are any conflicts with mechs or internal parts when it comes to rest inside the cabinet.
The style also is based on what will let the playfield set securely in the service position.
It’s definitely something you have to map out and put some thought into.
Easy to have something that seems to work only to collide with some minor thing you weren’t expecting like a tilt Bob,transformer power box etc when lowered.
Do you typically mount them at the front using the same bolts as the playfield hangers? Or with the different mechs and things involved on different machines, do you have to mount them completely/directly to the playfield(i.e. both front and back mounts)?
Quoted from Pinballer73:For those interested in learning more about the digital printing learning cuve, this video is excellent, what Bruce has to say about the process is very insightful.
Lots of great info here. Makes me wish I had gone so I could chat with Bruce a bit on this stuff. I'm a graphic designer who worked at a flexographic printing company for about 5 years. Bruce is speaking my language here with all his tech talk. I hope he does go into the extended gamut stuff as most of those digital presses add orange, green, and violet to really narrow that gap of hitting the most Pantone colors possible. It'd be even better if they had machines that could add in the light versions of CYMK, too. I think if these digital presses added white as standard, that'd help a ton, too.
While it does suck that they're no longer screen printing as it truly does produce the best results, I completely understand the shift to digital. Eventually, the product a digital press makes will be damn near indistinguishable from a screen printed one. We're just not there, yet. The only thing I worry about is as the old, original stuff goes away(UV fading of colors, fewer people owning great unrestored originals, games owned by people who aren't as socially active in the hobby as we Pinsiders are), the reprinted ones become the standard, even thought their colors are technically off. I just hope there's a database of what the original colors were from the factory. If there is, then I'm not worried at all. If not, we may(in 50 years, mind you) start to suffer from what I've dubbed "design drift". That's where the original design/color of something has been unintentionally supplanted by subsequent replacements and the original version has been sadly lost.
Quoted from fattmatt1972:from dog shit to ducks nuts.
That's a new one for me, haha! But I guess if you were English, it'd be a much shorter trip as in: from dog shit to the dog's bollocks.
Chris, when you get the armor powder coated like on this Shadow, do you put some kind of felt or other soft surface on the inside of the hinge to protect against scratching at all?
It may be a non-issue as I'm sure most of the pins you restore never really get moved/transported much, if at all, once they're setup back in someone's home...
I ask because I want to do this to my TZ(already have the black legs on), but I also take it every year to the Golden State Pinball Festival and am afraid the raising and lowering of the head might introduce some light scratches there.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:If you ever look deep into the cabinets you can often find scrap pieces of other cabinets.
This is where they would saw up the “culls” and use those scraps to make cash box dividers,playfield runners things like that.
When you build 4000 cabinets you can do that and keep moving.
When you only build or have one it’s much more difficult and personal.
They did that for arcade games, too. Pretty wild to think that when they stopped selling a game, if they had cabs that were empty, they just reused the largest panels for coin door panels, control panels, and other smaller bits in arcade games. Crazy to see that kind of thing.
As for the panels of some of the cabinets bowing, I'd imagine it's from all the wood that gets shipped to suppliers while still very green. Wood these days seemed to be grown so fast, with the rings so far apart, and still so green that there have been times I've been at Home Depot or wherever and the wood still felt wet to the touch! If you take that stuff home and throw it in your garage in the wrong season, it'll bow up like a pool noodle.
Yeah, those half-toning areas can be a monster to recreate. It's an artifact of an era where printing high resolution gradients from one color to the next was not only difficult to do digitally, but damn near impossible when translating that image to screen printing. Now we're at a point where the chore is recreating that half-toning effect to reproduce the limitations of the era.
I'd like to say something like, "just make a couple stencils with a personal plotter/cutter like a Silhouette Cameo or a Cricut," but I don't think even with their super fine cutting tips, that they'd be able to cut something that small and retain the level of detail necessary to make it look correct. With that said, though, there are places online that sell halftone stencils. I just can't vouch for their sizing and how well they work. Here's one that has the idea right, but may be too large for the ES application:
https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Ass-Halftone-Stencils-BAD6048/dp/B06Y14GFN8
What's sad is that with the amount of time you've spent on these cabinets, a good graphic artist could redraw the correct cabinet art and have that be the go to for decals for this game. The reason it's "sad" is because there is absolutely zero reason for the artwork that's out there now to be so horribly incorrect, outside of pure laziness. I wouldn't even be surprised of whoever did those graphics just threw them into an auto-trace and spit out one side, then just reflected the image for the sides of the head and fixed the letters and called it good.
It just shows what a travesty a lot of reproduction art is for these multi-thousand dollar machines, in a multi-million dollar hobby. There's zero reason for it other than people just trying to make as quick a buck as possible with exerting as little effort as possible.
It's the very reason why people like you, Chris, deserve every accolade for keeping the high standard of quality and factory correctness you do, when at all possible. While you end up with a vastly superior product anyway(that is technically more factory correct than a decal), it just sucks that you have to do all this work because of one lazy graphic artist, especially when Rick is most likely sitting on the factory films for the cabinet art.
Keep up the great work!
Quoted from mmr61184:There are a few guys out there that actually put the work into creating good quality correct decals. Unfortunately some are handcuffed by being able to secure the licenses to produce them in favor of other lazy artists. Phoenix arcade produced some very nicely done decals his TZ and Addams family when he had the license were as close to original that I have ever seen. He still has some old stock floating around but I know he doesn’t produce them anymore because of how difficult the process is.
Yeah, PA's TZ decals were gorgeous. I knew I should've bought a set years ago when they were plentiful. I mulled it over, but didn't really need them yet, or even now. But, like CPR's silk screened TAF playfields, it's best to buy the good, correct, well produced stuff when you see it and I'm glad I jumped on that one. The direct printed stuff will never match up to the individually ink-matched, screened playfields. Like these ES cabinet decals, they'll be "close enough".
I'm tired of "close enough"....
Quoted from High_End_Pins:The quality continues to decline as the market saturates with them.
This is the exact opposite of what should be happening. People should be coming out with stuff that is incrementally better than the previous guy's stuff in order to differentiate their product as either newer or of a superior quality.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:I would rather spend a month painting a cabinet than install a shit set of decals.Just because they have a gold label on them doesn’t mean they are worth using.
Absolutely agree, just because it's licensed doesn't mean it's factory correct.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:Any and every cabinet I can paint or figure out a way to I do even if I could decal. That is mostly quality and durability driven. I also like the exclusivity of it.
And technically more factory correct than decals, in a way.
I almost wonder if you were to map out how many of each game you've ever done repaints of the cabs on, and if there's one that stands out the most on frequency and lack of replacement decals, if it would be feasible at all to make your own screens for it and do it just like the factory did way back when. I know stencils work fairly well, but when those themselves are getting costly, reusable screens might seem like more of a viable option. If nothing else, it'd be interesting to quantify all the options and really hash out if that might be something to consider in the future. Like if you could count on doing two ES's per year, for example, mixed in with some other cabs with simpler art that same year, I think it might be something to really consider. But if it's years in between ES's, or other full artwork repaints, then not so much.
Sorry I'm still harping on this. It just bothers me so much because this artwork is so extremely easy to recreate in Illustrator. It's even easier if/when someone owns the factory films...(cough, cough).
Quoted from High_End_Pins:I don’t know if the current state of licensed parts is an oversight or sabotage but it’s definitely a shame.
Might actually be sabotage in the sense that if there's nothing but inferior product out there, when the license holder produces the really nice, correct product, they potentially have a full, fresh installed base of people out there who need it to correct their piss poor versions.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:Missing a bulb hole. CPR is having a tough time with these.
Plus the base blue seems too dark(could be the lighting, though), the red in the "lock" letters is off, and the black outlines on everything are WAY too thick!
This stuff really isn't all that hard. If they're not working from original films that have been scanned, then they're working from a scanned original playfield, one would hope. I can't imagine the difference from whatever source image they've got to the image you posted of the original playfield are THAT different from each other, are they? Yikes.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:Me too on the gold used it’s a tough match for certain. I cover it here.
The Addams Family Gold Pinball 5
First off, body cam is fantastic! Makes total sense for some of these processes you have/do. Also, the microphone picks up your voice better and more consistently. It also made for perfect air quotes on that decal set.
Secondly, I'm fairly certain that the gold on there is Pantone 871, but again, seeing it in person with my swatch book would be best, however improbable that might be for now. I do know, however, that if I ever do make it back to Minnesota, I am dropping in on LTG. That's a guarantee regardless of needing to see that gold color!
As for that decal, yes, it's a travesty that they are licensed and yet so far off. Proves that they're just printing these things on a standard printer and not using the proper metallic inks. I don't understand why Rick allows all this crap out there. If it's licensed, it needs to be perfect. If it's not right, it shouldn't get licensed. I guess he just wants a piece of every pie that's out there.
I wonder if it's worth spending the time to paint, and clearcoat, the "gold" plastics with a paint that actually matches the gold used in the vines on the apron and elsewhere? You wouldn't even have to use "gold" plastics, you could use factory blues just to test it out.
Just thinking out loud....
Quoted from DeeGor:Pinballdecals.com used to sell plastics that looked more like real gold. Unfortunately they don't sell them anymore. They looked way better than the factory "gold" plastics. I'm not sure how they held over time, but they looked pretty nice when new.
https://www.pinballdecals.com/TAFGKitPage.html
Oof. That's a bit much. I was just thinking about a metallic gold paint.
It might be worth a shot to try this stuff on an old clear ramp to see how it'd work on tinting a new one:
https://www.amazon.com/Krylon-K09037007-Stained-Glass-Aerosol/dp/B07H438FWB
It's pretty impressive stuff. I've used a few of the other colors on clear plastic items before and as long as you evenly coat what you're painting, you'd never know the plastic was ever clear. This source is quite pricey, but it's more to show the product. I'm sure you can find them elsewhere much cheaper.
If someone printed those TAF apron decals for you, tell them that next time they do it, to make the blacks all four color blacks, meaning 100% fills of each of the C, Y, M, and K colors. It'll help almost completely alleviate the differences in the black that you can see between the decals and the apron color.
If they're just the stickers you can buy everywhere that you modified by cutting out some of the larger swatches of the black, well done!
Quoted from PinMonk:Almost looks like a CMYK->RGB color conversion error on all those stickers. Just so wrong.
Or just a simple Pantone Spot color to CYMK conversion/interpretation error by a printer driver. Or worse yet, somebody using a picture to match colors instead of having the real object in from of them to match to a proper swatch book. Either way, yet another example of how the license holder of this company's games does not check for accuracy of any kind when issuing licenses.
Quoted from LynnInDenver:This is being compounded now by Adobe no longer paying license fees to Pantone to include the libraries. If you want the Pantone swatch libraries on a brand new install, you now have to pay an added monthly subscription to Pantone.
Ohh, there are ways around that...
They're actually free and legal, too. There are a couple videos about how to do that on Youtube.
Quoted from LynnInDenver:There's also the issue that the CMYK values of spot colors back when the screen prints were made are not what the CMYK Bridge values of spot colors are now - Pantone also tweaked those slightly during that change. They're more than close enough, but some people would still consider the SLIGHT shift a problem.
This is why I always have my swatch books on hand, one old, one new. I also make sure to look at the colors in warm white light and cool white light. I try to make damn sure that the spot color I want IS the spot color I want.
Quoted from High_End_Pins:My Rocky project will likely have a spare glass.
I somehow or another hid the one that came in for it from myself in the deep reaches of my under the steps closet.
I think it came in when I was having my hardwood floors redone [quoted image][quoted image]
Well, this makes me glad to know that I'm not the only one who flips off inanimate objects...
Quoted from punkin:Hopefully learn to be a better guest too.
This is hilarious. No offense punkin, but in many of the threads I've seen you post in, you LOVE to stir the pot more than anyone else!
Quoted from High_End_Pins:Remakes.
I wish I had an OG Fred Smith. It was my favorite board back then.
I had a 9 foot half pipe in my back yard and it was an awesome chapter from the time I was 13-17 then I started getting into shit.
I've still got my original Powell just over in my closet. It saw a lot of use back in the day so it's no showpiece, but it still has a lot of sentimental value, so I keep it.
Quoted from PinMonk:This dude printed his OG KISS playfield over again and re-cleared. Said it was a personal project, but wow, imagine if you could just sand and reprint beat playfields at will...
The problem with direct printing is that you lose some vibrancy of certain colors, in particular greens and oranges. It's just the way process colors are made versus that of the screen printed, very specific, only used in one place, spot color.
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