I have been meaning to get around to making a thread about this but have been slacking. This is a Taxi purchased by my dad a while back and it was a project machine. Dirty, rough cab, rough playfield, rust, no display, hacked boards, ripped and crinkled translite, etc. CPR playfields are hard to come by and expensive when they do pop up, so my dad decided to tackle repainting the playfield.

Playfield aside, nearly everything else if available in repro or NOS. New parts purchased so far:

-New ramps
-New Plastics
-New Mirrored backglass
-New Cab decals
-Correct original coin door with "W" logo
-New Siderails
-Various other playfield and cabinet parts
-New spinout ramp (blue)

As you can see in the patched together scan below the playfield was yellowed, the inserts were lifting or missing and there was wear down to the wood around the pop bumpers. We developed a gameplan on how we wanted to proceed and set to work. More to come in the following posts.

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Some of you may notice that this is a Lola machine. I personally would have loved to keep it that way, but all of the repro parts and decals are Marilyn, so we had to convert this machine. (New roms as well).

First off the inserts were terribly unlevel and some were cracked badly. All of the inserts were removed and sanded down flat. Broken ones were replaced. My dad did all of this work and I am glad I happened to not be around while he was working on them. Sanding down and installing inserts is no fun at all. I experience that first hand with my Paragon playfield. The second thing that needed to be taken care of were the white areas that are under the playfield plastics. Over the years this area had yellowed and looked awful. This was masked and painted quickly with a think coat of clear applied over it to lock it in. We also painted the middle area white to prepare the area for the large decal we would be applying later. 001_White.jpg002__White.jpg003_White.jpg

Next was the gray pavement. This was going to be tricky. I know there are some masters out there that can put down frisket and free cut everything by hand. We tried this.....and failed miserably. I have access to a vinyl machine at work so we scanned the playfield and I made a mask file in adobe illustrator. I tried to take into account the inserts for the passengers in particular. As you can see the photos around Gorbie and Santa, I didn't want the entire insert to be transparent, only the clear parts of the inserts. This took some careful measurement, but in the end it worked out really well. We took our time installing the vinyl masks and everything lined up really well.

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The hardest part for me was mixing a gray that we could use to spray the pavement parts. This part scared the crap out of me because if it were too off, it would look terrible. That said, we did not have a good reference for the color. I looked at pictures online and at the CPR website and mixed a color I thought was pretty good. When we first started spraying I thought I had made a terrible mistake as the color was so much different than the current state of the playfield. However, in the end after it dried it looked correct and we are really happy with the color. The masks also worked perfectly! A big weight was lifted after it done as I was dreading doing this part. Phew!

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........and our first *$#& up! Forgot to cut the striping mask off. You can clearly see the color difference here. We fixed this later.

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Next, white stripes for the road and decal installation. The decals purchased off ebay aren't perfect, but they do look good once installed and cleared over. We are happy with them and lined up well enough.

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Next: The blue areas around pinbot and the slings.

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Yellow paint and waterslide decals!

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Then finally some more clearcoat. There had been various coats of clear in between a lot of these steps. The playfield is now curing before it will be wet sanded and polished. These pics are from the first coat which had a couple of runs because the playfield wasn't flat. Dad fixed that and applied another couple of coats. We will wait to finish it until the after the cab is done. This should give it a couple of months to cure.

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Also I want to emphasize that this is my dad's restore, not mine. He has done all of the grunt work, I just hopped in to help on a few things and post this thread

My dad found some pictures of the game from the day we brought it home. I had forgotten how dirty and crusty it was

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Also, here is another picture of the playfield as it sits right now, curing. On another note, I keep a blog on Facebook about our work on these games if you want to check it out. I update it every week and show progress of the different projects we have going.

https://www.facebook.com/jurassicarcade

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Ya I can share the .AI file if anybody wants to make their own masks. They aren't 100% of everything you need, but they are what we needed.

Let me put them on my box.net

You should be able to download the vector file from here. All I ask is that people don't steal this and try to sell the masks. You should be able to take this file to your local sign shop and have them cut you a sheet of these out of vinyl.

https://app.box.com/s/3j42dq4v9sefgoepyby5h00fva8sozzq

I don't remember what color he ordered, but I kind of think so. It has been so long since we discussed it.

It is not, my dad has been slowly going through the bottom of the playfield replacing all of the bulb sockets and cleaning everything. Once that is done we will start on the top. We will also be starting on the cab soon.

Mike, I drew all of those myself in Illustrator.

All of the files I have are what I shared earlier in the thread. I know nothing about the cameo but it might be able to do what you need. It is hard to say without seeing one in person.

Playfield is being reassembled. This is a slow and tedious process as each hole has to be redrilled before we can put anything on the playfield. The clear coat goes down into the holes and if you do not predrill you can and will crwck the clear coat. This is my favorite part of the restoration process.

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Reverse of the original which was blue skirts with red caps. Made the change since we are using a blue spin out. Sorry you don't like it.

That is the plan my friend. I will also be bringing my Congo which is getting the same treatment Should be a fun show.

Playfield is finally completed. It has been wrapped and will go into storage until the cabinet is finished.

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