After a long hiatus I'm finally back into pinball and will be starting to document my Grand Lizard restoration project. I'm a pretty bad writer, procrastinator and even worse keeping up with forum related stuff so I'll apologize in advance if I take my sweet time with this..
Story so far:
I've owned a couple Grand Lizards for years collecting dust in my garage. I got my first GL in overall decent shape, it played good and everything was working properly. The playfield was pretty rough though, the lower playfield was more or less OK but there was quite a bit of wear that was patched with black paint as shown in the picture below:
Patched wear
Upper playfield was worse, way worse. One of the previous owners felt he/she had some Picasso artistic skills and butchered it this way:
Picasso artwork
I loved to play this pinball but looking at that artwork was such an eye sore I had to do something and while aggregating assets for my short lived pinball assets website (long story for another day) I came across a NOS playfield scan for it.
A few months later I found another (this one non working) GL in Craigslist for $200 bucks. Motherboard was missing a chip and the battery holder and the playfield was in even rougher shape as shown in the picture below:
04 (resized).jpg
I primarily got this pinball as for $200 bucks I felt it was a good opportunity to use it as reference while I did the restoration on my working machine and to use for parts if needed.
At this point I forget what broke on my working GL but prompted me to start the project and fix it at the same time. In hindsight that was a bad idea and I think I should have fixed the issue first and make sure I left a working pinball for later.
And so my restoration project begun.. I tore down everything from the working pinball playfield and it sat on my garage for several years like that. I had no GL fun for years
A month ago I decided enough is enough and I wanted to at least get something working so I grabbed the playfield from the non-working machine and placed it in the cabinet of the working pinball and crossed fingers. I checked a few things and once I was comfortable turning it on I did. It almost worked.. but some solenoids weren't working at all. After some debugging/tracing I realized the voltage cable was nipped for some reason.. and there was a blown fuse. After fixing that I got a working pinball!
03 (resized).jpg
Or so I thought.. Well it works, but randomly decides to freeze up and only the flippers seem to work and all solenoids stop and scoring gets screwed up too. If I turn it off and on again it works again for some random amount of time and happens again. This made me realize I'm closer than I thought to having two working GL's though..
I decided not to focus on fixing this issue at the moment as this endeavor gave me enough momentum to continue my original plan of restoring the already tore down playfield!
The plan:
* Scale the NOS playfield scan appropriately and make sure inserts more or less line up with playfield
* Improve playfield scan as much as possible (it looks really good as it is but if I'm investing the time in this I might as well do it better)
* I've priced out a printing service that would do an alternate material similar to 3M control tack for wrapping cars. It was pretty inexpensive so I'll give it a shot ($50) and they said they will drop in a test print on cheap paper for free to make sure things line up
* Sand and maybe paint the playfield to prep it for the overlay
* Clear coat it (With my living situation I can't really do automotive clear coat so I'll probably have to stick to Rustoleum gloss clear)
* Line up the overlay with the soap/water method
* Produce and print decals for the inserts and add to playfield
* Clear sand and level everything
I don't know if this is the right or wrong way of doing it and frankly at this point I don't even care anymore. As I mentioned at the beginning of my post I'm a procrastinator so IMO anything is better than nothing, I fear being perfectionist and want everything done 'right' will just hamper me and I'll push this even longer.
[Next post: Initial tests fitting and scaling playfield scan to playfield]