My big Christmas present was a scrollsaw this year so I was pretty excited to finally use it. I received my set of blank plastics yesterday and got all the parts together to make the replacement playfield graphic.

Since I had a decent graphic already, I was able to simply trace it out onto the plastic sheet, freehand in a new end to replace the broken one and run it through the saw. It came out pretty decent, not perfect - the saw tends to wander a bit and its hard to get a straight edge - but I think it is acceptable.tracing the graphicthe added endcutting the plastic on the sawthe end result
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I was going to leave it as-is, but I had read about "flame smoothing" the edges and I thought I might as well give it a try while I was practicing. So I dug out the torch and set the newly cut plastic into the vice. I was really tenative at first, worrying that 1 second too long and it would burst into flame or drip down over the vice, but its pretty forgiving and I had no trouble other than the narrow piece in the center softened up and the plastic bent a little!flame smoothingflame smoothing
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With the plastic finished, the last step was to drill the holes in it. I was super worried about this, drilling into plastic is one of the common ways to crack it so I put a piece of scrap above and below and tightly clamped it down before drilling slowly and lightly with the drill. I don't know if that was the best way to do it or not, but I had no trouble and all holes were drilled successfully with the result that I had a new plastic!
drilling holesdrilling holesa replacement plastic

Graphics - Part 1

With the plastic finished I turned my attention to the artwork. It was pretty easy to take a picture with it on top of a grid and using the grid, get it sized correctly, then extend the corner out to where it ought to beextending the artwork

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A problem I discovered was that the original piece had deep scratches in it. The scratches messed up the scan and would have been very visible in the final productvisible scratches

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So I spent some time cleaning up the artwork, not perfect but it should be adequatecloseup of originalafter cleanup

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With the artwork ready to go, it was time for the most difficult part of it, trying to match the colors - its tricky because part of it depends on how it was scanned and part on how my particular printer does the color. Here is the first pass without any correction, you can see the colors and brightness are way offmatching the colors

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After several passes I had a close match, then it was time to print onto the decal paper. I purchased a set of "Laser Waterslide Clear Paper" so I could essentuially make the image a big decal I could slide onto the plastic.

Naturally the graphic would not fit on a 8.5x11 decal sheet, so I cut it in half at the thinnest point and printed the two halves out. Thats when I discovered my laser printer doesn't seem to like this paper. It leaves a ghost print that ruins the image...sigh. You can see how the red ghosts down into the yellow in the top graphic.the colors run

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Fortunately I noticed that the colors seem to bleed after a couple of inches, so I turned the image 90 degrees and let the bleed happen out into the empty space, at least I had a usable image!
a usable image

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With anticipation I cut out the bottom half decal and put it into the waterthe decal is softening in the water

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and successfully got it onto the plastic. It doesn't look very good though as I forgot about a critical thing, there is no "white" in laser decals, it leaves them clear! You can see in the pic that the cream-tint is there and the white of the magazine is colored as it goes through the decal but I need the white to be there as well.
the decal has no white background

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So I ripped it off and now I have to figure out if there is some way to print the white so that it will actually show up on the decal or if I should abandon the decal approach and go with a stick-on paper approach. I think there is "white" decal paper (rather than clear) but I have also read threads where people argue to use paper rather than decals.

hah!
It is not nearly as easy as you make it sound.

My white decal paper came in and I printed out my graphic. Fortunately the printer seemed to like the paper better as it didn't bleed colors

unfortunately, attempting to get it smooth on the plastic proved nearly impossible. The decal is slightly sticky so anything pressed onto it simply makes it lift up. It wrinkles terribly and air bubbles do not come out at all, they simply slide around and even if you can get them to the edge, half the time they reoccur. I tried using the Microset product but that made the decal like wet tissue paper and I lost edges and any hope of smoothness.wetting the decalwrinklesair bubbles.
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For the second attempt, I did not try the MicroSet product and I had slightly better results. Still not what I would consider great but it was adequate. with a couple of coats of clear on it, it wasn't too bad and the defects were not too visible on the table.

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My LED's came in yesterday. Its a simple install, they fit right into the big sockets under the blue arc and are amazingly brighter. To install them I had to disconnect the big resistor on the little board next to them - that is a "warming" resister which supposedly keeps the bulbs partially lit so they can flash faster. But it is not needed with the LED's and it keeps them lit all the time. So I simply snipped one lead and left it in place in case someone wants to revert it back to stock in the future. I don't know why anyone would want to though, the LED's are so much better!
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The bulbs are $10 each at (get the 12v ones): https://www.pilotlights.net/ge-303-led-replacement-ba15s-base-g8-sc-bayonet-34
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My original flash with the original bulbs (the flash is at about 35 seconds in)

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The new and improved flash with the LED's:

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I am still thinking I might do a custom job and make it 4 LED's across the blue arc, that would be even brighter and more impressive, but this is great for now..

first attempt at touching up the backglass.

After a couple coats of triple-thick I wanted to try touching up the backglass. I chose the opaque black areas as that way I didn't have to worry about color matching or translucency. I picked the 2 small windows at the bottom, there was some black missing around the edge of the window and it seemed a good test.DSC00549 (resized).JPGDSC00551 (resized).JPG
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I masked the area and using createx opaque and a small paintbrush I filled it in. I used a flashlight under the glass to see where the black might be thin, allowing light to go through.DSC00554 (resized).JPG
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it seemed to work ok, so I touched up a couple of other areas where the black was cracked and missing, using the flashlight to highlight it.DSC00559 (resized).JPG
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I think it came out ok for a first attempt, the real test comes with colors and translucency but at least the before and after is noticeable:
before

after

backglass touchup continued.... I have finished the opaque areas. The black came out pretty good, but the rest looks pretty poor. Color matching continues to be my nemisis...even when painting onto white paper and letting it dry, it looks different than when it is on the glass. Add to that, some of the areas were a mixture of black and blue so I tried to stab on some black and then after it dried, to paint over with blue. The result was they mixed and I got a dark greyish blue...sigh
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In this before/after pic, some of it is the original glass, which had paint flecks moved around, but you can really see the the errors in the painting. it looks marginally better than the original but only from far away.backglass-before touchupbackglass-after touchup
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Here the color variances are very noticablethe white clouds show obvious color mismatch
the blue areas show obvious color problems
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and I haven't even tried the translucent areas at all. The Flash logo for example, is about as hammered as it can get and still be there. With a bizarre dot pattern I won't even try to do anything about. My thoughts are to cut away the original paint and airbrush a translucent red on it. That way I don't have to color match at all.original flash logo

Cutting the old paint is quite a challenge so far. I read somewhere to use a hot knife, but that didn't seem to help. I've tried slicing slowly, pressing down, but it just chips off pieces at the cut. Fortunately so far it has only chipped into the black where it was relatively easy to repaint, but I am rethinking it. I might just try a little translucent red and red LED's and see how it looks.

I started with the player "1" which is translucent to allow the light to shine through but shows significant breakage of the old paint. I got it reasonably acceptable after touchup of the black edges but really small areas simply cannot be done.
the '1' before any work is donethe '1' after cutting out the old

At least the shine-through wording came out pretty good. Here is the "Highest Score" windows before and after. Not perfect but much better than it was.
High Score-BeforeHigh Score-After touchup

Backglass update....

I tried the see-through areas and am quite dissapointed with the results. I simply cannot match the color and translucency with the tools (and skillset) I have available.

I started with a small area, her cape has a small square sticking out past his body. Its in poor condition. Here is the original, front and back:
front of work areaback of work area
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step 1 was to get rid of the spots...cutting away the spots
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then I had to touchup the edges with black and try and color/translucency match. it came out ok, but definitely not perfect. the result
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After that I realized I simply will not be able to do small details. The "Flash" logo is far too small to try with as are the player number areas. In the end I simply got a fairly close red/orange and painted a few coats over the top of the existing paint. It doesn't look great but that is all I can do for now. For the details in the middle, such as the cracks on his skin - I am just leaving it. It will have to be advertised as "Backglass in fair condition" if I ever sell it. So this is the end result, the last few areas of paint are drying and then I will put it back in the machine and post some pics with the lights on behind it.
final result

There we go. I am finished for now with the Flash. The other piece that needs work is the cabinet but I need to wait until summer to clean out the garage and make space so it will do for now. It plays brilliantly, lots of fun and the playfield looks great. The backglass isn't too bad and it will be nice to take the skills I have learned and move on to my next project!

The full tablebackglass lights onbackglass lights off