(Topic ID: 142190)

How to retheme a pin...questions

By pinlink

8 years ago



Topic Stats

  • 10 posts
  • 5 Pinsiders participating
  • Latest reply 8 years ago by 85vett
  • Topic is favorited by 4 Pinsiders

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    #1 8 years ago

    I have recently started thinking about retheming a pin. I have looked through several of the retheme threads here on Pinside (as well as the minimum parts to build a whitewood thread) but still have a few (seemingly) basic questions about starting a project like this. The minimum parts to build a whitewood thread seems to focus on building a pin from scratch (which is awesome and super helpful!), but I have questions specifically on retheming a pin. Let's say I want to retheme a system 11 like pinbot for example. My questions are specific to the hardware side of retheming and not the software at this point. Here is my first question:

    1. What's the best way to obtain a whitewood playfield (or rethemed playfield) for the existing pin? Do you totally strip the existing pin's playfield, then trace it onto a piece of plywood and start cutting out the new playfield that will have the new rethemed art on it? Do you just use the existing pin's playfield for the retheme playfield (i.e. strip the current playfield of all art and screen print the new rethemed art onto that playfield)? Would I need to buy a new pinbot playfield to use for my retheme?

    Ideally I would have the rethemed playfield on a rotisserie sitting next to the pinbot, and then piece by piece, transition all of the parts to the new playfield. Right? I would be nervous about stripping the playfield and just having a pile of parts while I got the new playfield ready to be populated. Thanks for any guidance on this, and feel free to post questions on this subject if you have them. I'll have more questions soon I'm sure.

    #2 8 years ago

    Either way will work but will depend greatly on your wood working skills. Most rethemes will take the original PF and change the artwork. I would recommend just buying a trashed PF vs ruining your current PF as well if you go that route which would also help with your rotisserie idea.

    Have you already thought about the artwork for your new theme? That process sounds easy but I'm finding out it's actually quite a bit more challenging than you would expect to have your artwork applied to a PF. There are 4 options that I've found:
    - Overlay - Easiest to accomplish and is best if you can find a printer that can print in white. Trust me on this.
    - Direct print - more like a real PF. Seems like a viable option but can be rather expensive
    - Screen printing - Need special skills to accomplish this
    - Hire a local artist to airbrush/paint - Something I thought would be cool to do. Not sure what the cost would be

    #3 8 years ago
    Quoted from 85vett:

    I would recommend just buying a trashed PF vs ruining your current PF as well if you go that route which would also help with your rotisserie idea.

    ^This. Much easier and time saving. Remove any mylar and sand the artwork being careful to remove the minimal.

    Quoted from 85vett:

    There are 4 options that I've found:
    - Overlay - Easiest to accomplish and is best if you can find a printer that can print in white. Trust me on this.
    - Direct print - more like a real PF. Seems like a viable option but can be rather expensive
    - Screen printing - Need special skills to accomplish this
    - Hire a local artist to airbrush/paint - Something I thought would be cool to do. Not sure what the cost would be

    Overlay: Curious which vinyl you would you recommend on this approach? Do they come with different levels of gloss and finish? Issues with bubbling over time?
    Direct print and screen printing: Both difficult no? Getting the precise lineup is a must or else you have to start over with sanding right?
    Direct airbrush/paint: Great option if you can find a talented artist to work within your budget. Be very careful on the type of paint used as some will react negatively with certain clear coats and ruin your artwork.

    Also note: You want to do a system 11 game? That's slightly more complex then other games. System-11 machines connect through a 3rd party interface board. Youll want to talk to Gerry more about that option assuming you go with P-ROC.

    #4 8 years ago

    I did a couple of re-themes, of EMs, before I did a custom game from scratch. I looked for a trashed playfield of the game I wanted to use, did not want to take a belt sander to a really nice playfield (and currently have a really nice Grand Prix playfield as a result that at some point I'll find a worthy buyer far). By the way, the most important piece of advice I can give you is to go slow and avoid getting frustrated at the pace and decide, oh, I'll just use coarser sand paper -- never a good idea.

    In my case I airbrushed the new playfield, but to be honest, that sounds more impressive then it is, it was more of a 'mask and paint' and then I used water slide decals to add some art to inserts and a few other places. I went with painting, since i wanted to keep the EM feel, so the art was done in that style, which my default has limited detail. For my custom machine, I just recently used an overly to add the art. The tricky thing there is you need to have a pretty precise template to be sure things line up correctly.

    Here are a couple of photos to give you a feel for what I did.

    Here is the trashed playfield

    IMG_0161.jpgIMG_0161.jpg

    Sanded down to bare wood . . .

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    I use stickers to cover the inserts before a base coat of white, you can also see masking where I wanted to keep the natural wood.

    IMG_0197.JPGIMG_0197.JPG

    Part way through painting, you can get a sense of how I did this with masking to only expose the area I wanted to paint.

    IMG_0206.JPGIMG_0206.JPG

    And here it is close to being done, and you can see the use of the water slide decals near the inserts.

    DSC_1214.jpgDSC_1214.jpg

    DSC_1218.JPGDSC_1218.JPG

    Hopefully this helps. Happy to answer any questions you have.

    Good luck with your project

    Rosh

    #5 8 years ago
    Quoted from rosh:

    then I used water slide decals to add some art to inserts and a few other places.

    When you used these and then went to clear coat did you notice any discernable difference in height from the playfield? Nothing that would affect ball movement? Or are they thin enough that when you clear coat you cant tell the difference?

    #6 8 years ago
    Quoted from pinlink:

    I would be nervous about stripping the playfield and just having a pile of parts while I got the new playfield ready to be populated

    on this, I just unscrewed everything from the bottom, and removed the staples from the grounding braid. I then slide three pieces of cardboard (unused fedex boxes) one at a time under everything (top, middle, bottom), which given their size I could easily manipulate under the parts, I then slide those three together onto a larger board, then when I was ready I reversed the process and everything was pretty much where it needed to be to be re-attached, including the braid. Worked better than I had expected. Have used this technique three of four times when doing a 'swap', I do use some saw horses with the second/new playfield, with my rotisserie next to it to do the slide.

    #7 8 years ago
    Quoted from PinRebel:

    Nothing that would affect ball movement? Or are they thin enough that when you clear coat you cant tell the difference?

    water slide decals are incredibly thin. They are also very, very fragile when you put them on, ruined more than one, fortunately easy to print them. Well worth re-doing them if they don't go on perfect. I used by clear and white based on the use case.

    I used Varathane for the clear coat, and put on a lot of layers and there is no impact from the decals. The inserts are the biggest challenge, once you mask those and start painting, they end up lower then the level of the painted surface (and this assume you have sanded them flag and dealt with any cupping, sinking, etc. So it becomes important that the painted layers are not too thick. I then use varathane for the clear coat, applied with a paint gun (well actually an HVLP spray system from Rockler). Varathane is self leveling, so after the first few layers, I put on some thick layers and that does a nice job of leveling it all and making it nice and smooth. I'm sure others will totally disagree with this approach, but I have been pretty pleased with the results.

    #8 8 years ago

    Thanks everyone for the advice so far, very helpful! Sounds like I need to find a trashed playfield. I'm assuming the availability of the trashed playfields help to determine which pin you will retheme. Seems like Pinbot may be a good choice since a lot of people replace that playfield, and I have a pinbot. Well... anyone have a trashed pinbot playfield?

    #9 8 years ago

    My take:

    Whatever existing pinball you decide to use, be sure it's not something rare (or something desirable). If you find a trashed flash for example, I don't think anyone is going to cry if you retheme one since they made 19,500. You're probably more apt to find an EM for less money, but that also implies you're ok with working on an EM if a mechanical switch goes bad.

    If you want to retheme, I'd suggest sanding the whole playfield, then scanning it so you can get the positions of inserts, pop bumpers, slings, flippers, etc. Doesn't need to be high resolution, but it needs to be 1. You can find an HP 4600 transparent scanner on ebay for about $50 (keeping in mind modern drivers don't exist, you may have to run XP). Also you'll have to learn how to do some stitching to get the chunks merged together. You'll want to do the same for the plastics to get the shapes and hole positions.

    When you're ready to do art, I'd suggest the vinyl overlay method (but print a B&W copy to verify your merge worked and inserts didn't move). This is critical because if you're off by even 1/16", it'll show (unless you have a decently thick border around the inserts).

    If you want custom sounds, you'll want a wav trigger (it's like mp3 trigger, but it can handle polyphonic sound events.. meaning multiple channels at once). See the flash turned into a ghostbusters thread:
    https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/first-look-ghostbusters-custom

    #10 8 years ago
    Quoted from PinRebel:

    Overlay: Curious which vinyl you would you recommend on this approach? Do they come with different levels of gloss and finish? Issues with bubbling over time?
    Direct print and screen printing: Both difficult no? Getting the precise lineup is a must or else you have to start over with sanding right?

    Overlay - I'm sure there are several different kinds. The printer that has been helping me is using a 3M product. Not sure of what it really is but the name on the back says "3M Scotchcal Film". The "clear" part over it is actually laminate. I do believe you can get different levels of gloss on lamination but someone in that business would have to speak to it. Overlay's do have the tendency to bubble over time.

    Direct print and screen printing - Pretty much. I haven't gone down this path yet so can't speak to how things get lined up correctly.

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