My friend purchased a Williams Flash machine but the backglass is almost completely gone. We need some hi-res images of the backglass to do some sort of a translite replacement. I've already done the search and found that there aren't any replacement backglasses available, so it seems a vinyl translite is my best bet.

Any help with images would be greatly appreciated. Any suggestions on doing this sort of a replacement would be appreciated. I've found a couple web sites, but more information is always better.

Thanks in advance.

I'd love a scan but I'm willing to do the photoshop work and do it the old fashioned way with photos and stretching. (Painful but doable.) The backglass is so bad that you can see all of the circuit boards through the backglass. It is better than some that I have seen in the last year.

Patofnaud:
That would be fantastic. I would be happy with any hi-res pictures at all. Whole glass, and then break the glass into different sections. Breaking it into 4 pictures, or whatever the minimum focal length on your camera would be great. Without the camera's flash would be best so there is no reflection. I think that the limit on pictures on pinside is 3MB, but if they are larger, we should be able to work out someway to transfer them. (dropbox, or some other file sharing service).

Deaconblooze: My friend is going to be taking the pictures and making a master single large image. As soon as that image is done, I will send you that raw image so you can get it printed and make a translite out of it. (I've seen others do this, with a good amount of success).

The flash from the camera is definitely an issue. The pictures are also rather small which could be pinside or could be the camera. The pictures are only about 300K in size. Is that the size it is from the camera or have they been reduced. If there is a chance that your camera has a raw mode, that is also better because you don't get all the jpeg artifacts.

Thanks for taking the time to get a few shots. Just in case the camera was reduced, I'll send you a pinside mail with my email address so you can send the shots directly to that account, and we don't need to worry about the pictures being reduced.

More pictures would definitely be better. If anybody else has access to a Flash machine, I would greatly appreciate any and all pictures. I can use some shots from my friend's machine and maybe just fill in the missing areas using portions of these shots.

Non-reduced pictures were never sent to me. I'm still looking for pictures, don't care if they are from multiple sources, just anything. Anybody that has pictures, send me a PM so that the pictures aren't reduced by pinside. They produced almost 20,000 of these machines. At least one pinsider out there must have a machine that they can take some photos of the backglass.

Burningman: If you can take some pictures of the backglass, I can get my friend to work on stitching the photos together. The more photos the better. Take them without the flash if possible. Lucky thing is the backglass was originally only done with a few colors. If only one of your colors is flaking, my friend should still be able to create a good backglass image.

Next time I see one of these machines in the wild, I will take a bunch of photos, but until that point, I'm still out of luck.

Thanks for the info. What material did you get your translite printed on? Did you print on the front side or on the reverse side and flip the image? Do you have any suggestions on reputable printers on the internet that could do this sort of image. Thanks for any other help that you have. It definitely seems like you have been down this road and any other experience you have would be helpful.

I already knew about the jpg stuff. Most of the original stuff is done as only a few colors, so if you need to compress, .pngs work really well. (JPGs were designed to make pictures look better, and the protocol interpolates between pixels to save file size. PNGs have a small color pallette (maybe 16 or 256 colors) so if the picture only has a couple of colors, it can be compressed very clearly.

Thanks in advance to anyone that can get me photos.