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.