Spent the day with my brother working in the garage on some replacement plastics for my MET Pro. He brought over our dad's band saw, scroll saw and drill press.

We made two replacement plastics and I think they look great! Both plastics are clear with no artwork, but are fairly complex shaped. We modified both slightly to hopefully fix some design issues.

We made the plastic around the cross wider, and less pointy.
We made the plastic at sparky's feet wider so that it would keep airballs down.

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Played a few games and it maybe my imagination, but it sparky hits are kept in control better. I need to put a few more games in on them, but I'm happy. Most of all it was fun!

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Thanks!

I tested using a plumbing torch to slightly melt the edges of a clear plastic. It worked pretty good to remove the cloudy edge and leave a shiny more transparent edge. Will take some practice. And it think it would work better on a sanded edge. But better than the unfinished edge.

Ive had a few people PM me and ask me to make them sparky anti-airball plastics. Starting to get feed back and it seems people are happy with the results.

Im not wanting to setup a mod side business, but it seems the new code the the magnet is making the airball issue worse. So im happy to help out fellow pinsiders.

First round i did for $3 a piece. But the USPS was not so gentle with one customers order and they were broken in the package. So i am gonna bump up the price to $4 for any future requests and use better more expensive packaging. So pm me if anyone is interested.

Sorry red, when i was at the post office the international rates are ridiculous. The cost of shipping would be far far more than a single plastic is worth. Just dont see it being worth it from your POV.

Im getting pretty good at cutting out plastics using a scroll saw and a drill press. But until now ive only done clear plastics.

Today i attempted with huge clunk of a failure to use the print on clear label and stick to underside of plastic method.... I dont have illustrator, photoshop, or an artistic bone in my body... So getting the image to print to scale was a mess. But after getting it printed and attached to the plastic, it was very dim washed out.. And the holes in the image didnt line up 100% with the new plastic... Sigh. I needed to put a layer of white on bottom to make it less washed out.

Need more practice.

Toyotaboy, in your gel medium method, did you just use the medium basically as glue to stick the photo to the back of the plastic? Thats different than the video shows. Would you do this before you cut the plastic? I wondered how well it would stick and if the cutting would get shavings under the image.

Jeff, lemme know when you get ure met premium and ill send ya one!

So here is my TFLE plastic recreation progress. Started pretty rough. But I'm getting there...

the plastic that sits between the left loop and the all spark on my TFLE broke. It is a two piece/layer plastic with artwork printed on the bottom of the top piece. The two pieces are riveted together with pressed rivets and the bottom plastic mounts (along with the all spark) to the left loop ball guide.

Heres the pic of the broken plastic and the replacements I got from my distro/stern.
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My first attempt was to scan and print the art work onto clear address label stickers. I placed the sticker on the bottom plastic. It was washed out and the whites weren't white enough. To top it off my first attempt at riveting broke/cracked the plastic.
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Next I moved away from the clear address label stickers to using photo paper. I also got more comfortable using gimp image editing and was able to edit the artwork to "remove the holes" from the scanned image. I also expanded the image to the size of the lower triangle plastic piece. I also get some gel medium as suggested above in this thread and used it to glue the image to the under side of the plastic.
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The result was that the gel medium made the inkjet ink run and get blurry. Also there are some air bubbles. Still not good.

Last attempt I used the same photo paper image, but I used some clear rattle can paint to put a couple thin coats on the top of the photo paper image. Then I used spray adhesive onto the image and stuck it to the underside of a new plastic.

The clear paint kept the inkjet ink from running. I think this one is getting closer although not perfect.
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I'll try one just like this last one, but using the gel medium as the glue to attach it to the plastic...

Another update on my learning to make plastics with artwork.

With the recommendation from a few pinsiders on this and other threads I bought some clear and white decal paper from decalpaper.com.

I printed out my artwork on the clear decal paper. I included various versions of it including some flipped so that I could apply it to the back of the plastic.

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Then I applied a couple thin coats of clear coat on top of the ink jet ink, so that it wouldn't run.

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Then I cut out one of the images. Here is a pic of the new plastics from Stern on the left, third is my clear plastic, and forth is the cutout decal paper image (with top clear coat). Notice I didn't drill the holes in my plastic where the rivets would attach the original double layers together. I am going for just a single layer plastic.

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Then I put the decal in some warm water for a about 30 secs. until the paper back slides easily away from the decal.

I gently applied the decal to the back of the pastic being careful to keep the orientation correct. It was confusing with the image being reversed. I won't lie I messed up a couple times and had to print again...

Here is the decal applied to the back of the plastic, and the original Stern plastic.

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Notice the decal is more transparent than the original. But when I put it on some of the white decal paper it looks pretty good with the white showing through.

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So I cut a piece of the white decal paper with nothing printed on it. I just wanted to use it as a background for the original image. here is my plastic and the white decal paper cutout.

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And finally a picture of the original Stern plastic on the left and my version on the right.

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Looks pretty good I think! The color is a bit off where the Stern version is a bit more bluish than mine. I played with the color levels in Gimp, but I wasn't able to find something that worked to my satisfaction.

I was pretty happy with it... Until....

When I installed the plastic in the game, I wasn't happy with it. It seems to stick out and not fit in with the game at all. Not sure why since I used the same artwork. Honestly when I put the new Stern plastics there they don't really look like they go with the game either. Maybe its cause I extended the image out where the Stern plastic is clear...

Here is a pic of the area of the broken plastic. The broken piece still partially in place under the allspark mount.

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Then my new plastic in place

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And a wider shot

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So I decided to scan the plastic that is mounted on the ball return area on the left side.

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(I have to put something in the corner of my scanner or it cuts off the image edges. I use pennies cause they are flat and dont effect the scanning.)

I sampled the purple and the background texture and colors and made a new image to put on the plastic that I think goes better with the game.

Heres a couple pics of the plastic installed. (I didnt' take the time to make a take a picture before putting it in the game I was so excited...) I think it blends in much better now.

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Thanks for all the pointers, tips and tricks from all the pinsiders out there!