Anyone know where to get replacement speaker grills? I really just need the mesh, I will paint it.

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Sanded my scratched up F14 speaker panel. From 320 through 3000, but it still has very fine scratches. I need to buy stuff tomorrow to buff it, hoping that removes the rest of scratches.

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Is that a product name? I tried meguiars ScratchX but it did nothing.

I really suck at buffing/polishing. Wish someone would make a guide. Not much info out there.

I tried that too. Maybe I need to be more aggressive, I’ll give it another try today. I’m just doing it my hand, maybe I need to buy a buffer but I don’t want to burn it.

That's a great idea, thanks.

I tried Novus 3 again and that added scratches, then Novus 2 brought it back to how it was before. So the scratches seem finer than Novus 2 can remove.

Went to the auto paint store. The lady there seemed like she was guessing at what I should do. She was trying to sell me this 3M 39062 polish for $30 and said to use with a DA and blue foam pad. I didn’t trust her so I passed.

Let me know what you find out please Kerry_Richard

Oh ok I’ll go pick some up then. She lost me when she said they use this to polish their DVDs.

I picked up a 8" 3M blue pad (05733) and 3M ultrafine polish (39062). A guy at the shop today knew a bit more and explained there are different steps to the 3M polish line. The blue is a polishing compound (the last step) so its more gentle than the other steps. The first steps are rubbing compounds and are more abrasive and will heat faster and remove more material. The product colors are a hint, so blue polish with blue pad, etc. He said since my DA is not random orbital I need to keep it moving to reduce chances of burning.

Hoping to learn more about all of this. I'd like to try the 3M rubbing compounds on my next playfield clearcoat job. I'm putting a hardtop on my F-14, so I will shoot a couple coats of clear on the sanded playfield so I can test on that without any risk of damaging art.

Did some polishing. It definitely looks better but did not remove the fine scratches. I’m not sure if the problem is my sanding or my polishing.

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Here you can see the fine scratches only in the light angle.

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I only had sanded all the grits, maybe I need to machine sand? I do not have ultra fine grits for my orbital.

3000. I think my hand sanding is too shitty. Just got paper for my DA orbital to try tonight.

Good tip!

I sanded with the DA. Came out better but I have machine swirl that isn’t polishing out. Maybe I’m not spending enough time on each grit. Seems like I’m having a hard time with this.

Yep and it even travels through the wiring harness. I would pull the board, unsolder physical parts like test switches and relays, clean board thoroughly with an acidic cleaner and a tooth brush, hose it down in the shower, rinse with alcohol (to displace water so it dries faster), blow dry with air compressor.

I’m certainly not an expert, but this has worked for all my sys9-11 games. Had F14 since 2011 and never had another problem with it after cleaning this way.

If the board is still bad after this, personally these days I would just replace it and sell the original as “for repair”.

I finally figured out how to restore speaker panels. Several attempts and an embarrassing number of hours went into this but now I know how to do it.

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This got out of hand and I spent almost an hour on it, haha

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/restoring-speaker-panels-the-hard-way

Looks great. Is this the one you used spraymax on?

Same as any other metal apron restore. Probably the most info out there will be for WPC.

There’s lots of options depending on how bad your apron is and how crazy you want to go on the restore. You can take it to a powder coat place and pay them to sand blast it for you. From there you could powder coat out or prime and paint and clear. New art can be decals or stencils/airbrush. If you clear a decal start with a few really light mist coats before you flood it. If the decal is cheap buy two and learn on a piece of scrap so you don’t melt it on your newly painted apron.