I have some time and the energy to try a total restore. I am taking an old machine and try to make it look like a museum-quality piece or hopefully at least just came off the factory. This means playfield repair/repaint, cabinet repair/repaint, all mechanicals removed and polished or restored. It is an oldie, 1965, back in the day when it didn't even shoot out the ball, you had to push a lever to bring the ball up into play, but that also makes it a bit simpler to debug if I screw something up terribly. It will probably take me 6 months or so but I am retired and it keeps me out of my wifes hair!

Here are a few pics of the original - which has a couple of sticky coils but otherwise played perfectly.Cabinet-PreAnything (2) (resized).JPG
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One thing that is really cool, is the posts are shiny metal! not a plastic. This seems like a golden opportunity for someone to make new chrome posts.. they would look awesome!

The first step was to remove everything so I could scan in the playfield. The scan will allow me to clean up the art and eventually get it to the cameo for paint masking.

This is not a very exciting process so I won't detail it but I took 81 pictures to make sure I can get everything back into place.

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Then it was time to flip it over and disconnect everything on the underside of the playfield. This is quite a bit more intricate as the number of wires is pretty astounding. Fortunately the underside is remarkably clean.

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With the playfield down to just a piece of wood. I could scan in the original artwork. I don't have the HP scanner so I use a modified Epson Perfection scanner to grab the playfield in chunks at 600dpi and then I stitch it together in an old copy of Photoshop I have. The resultant pic is over 1gb in size but came out pretty well and really shows the missing pieces of the artworkIMG_5551 (resized).jpg
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Work progresses, a couple more pics of the photoshop work underway...central dancer after restooriginalrestored

Wow, a bare wood total repaint. I don't think I have the guts to try that, keeping everything synced up would be really difficult... kudos to you!

I posted a quick video of tracing the fonts over in the photoshop thread: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/using-photoshop-with-the-playfield#post-6220584

While the Photoshop work slowly continues, I wanted to try something new. This machine is to be my attempt at a museum quality restore and that includes the metal. I have read threads where people send off their metal to be powdercoated but I don't think that is appropriate for a machine of this vintage, however some of the plating looks tired and worn so I thought it would be fun to try my hand at re-plating them. If it doesn't work out, I can spray-paint with silver and continue with life.

I selected the bracket that holds the I,J,K relays as my first attempt. It is not in too bad of shape but definitely could look better.IMG_5575 (resized).jpgIMG_5576 (resized).jpg


I have attempted to polish these in the past using some copper cleaner. It works fairly well but it is very easy to "polish" off some of the bronze coloring and then it will never look consistent again.

In doing a little researching, it appears these parts were zinc coated and then had yellow passivate added, this gives the recognizable rainbow effect seen on the metal.

Zinc coating is a relatively simple process that uses an anode, conductive fluid and some voltage - it seemed like a fun thing to try. The cost is not too prohibitive so I figured - why not?

Of course when talking about replating, the one thing that everyone always says is that the plating will not cover up problems in the surface, you have to properly prep the surface before doing any plating. In my case, I assume that means removing the old plating and passivate. Everyone has a different opinion but most seem to at least start with wire stripping and sand blasting.

Since its a small part, I thought my trusty drill with wire brush would work on it.
wire stripping the part

It did not come out too bad, but it definitely doesn't seem ready for plating...after wire strippingafter wire stripping

Wire stripping does not really make a polished surface so I thought I would try some polishing. I have a attachment for the drill so I gave it a try.polishingafter the 1st round of polishing

I don't know if I didn't do it long enough or not enough polish compound or what but it doesn't seem much different, maybe a little shinier... but I still have the issue of yellow in the corners and where the wire wheel couldn't reach.

It seems like sandblasting might be the way to go....time to get a sandblasting cabinet.

While waiting on the sandblasting cabinet to arrive, I thought I would spend a little time prepping the playfield. It is in rough shape.prepping the playfieldsurface detailsurface detail

I laid it out and started the process with a scrubber doused in alcohol. I am specifically using a harsh scrubber as I want any loose paint chips to be gone. Following the initial scrubbing I went over each raised spot with the hammer and rounded impact tool to flatten. Then another heavy scrub with alcohol and magic eraser, followed by a scrub with Naptha. Then it was time to bring out the sander. I ran over the playfield with 220 grit, enough to cut down on high areas but I am not interested in removing all the artwork - I need it for reference when it comes time to paint!hammering down the high points
getting closer

One thing interesting that I noticed is that almost all of the posts have a double hole. double holedouble hole I know some are officially there to allow the original operators to make the game a little easier or harder, but I suspect these are there because the original holes became loose and they just moved up a quarter inch and redid them. I may have to drill out the hole I want to use and put a dowl in it to recreate a good hole.

My little sand-blaster cabinet arrived.sand blaster cabinet it is small but thats all I need and it seems to do the job. The only thing I wish is that it had a port for a vacuum.

I wanted the finish to be more or less a mirror when it was cleaned so I opted to purchase #10 glass beads rather than sand for blasting. The beads are rounded and run at only 60psi and I expected them to give a smoother finish. Unfortunately, as near as I can tell they don't do anything to this metal. I guess I expected them to cut away the old golden finish and take it back to bare metal but it looks like the plating/metal is a lot stronger. After several rounds of blasting, the piece really didn't look any different. In fact, I think I took a pic of it, but I cannot tell which is a before and which is an after pic..

So I went over the hardware store and purchased a bag of "play sand" - although I am not too sure I would want to play in it, the amount of dust it generated was astonishing. I ended up duct-taping my shop-vac to the air hole in the cabinet as it would fill the cabinet and completely obscure the work in literally 5 seconds.

Sand can be blasted at 90psi so I cranked it up and spent 1/2 hour blasting and looking and blasting and looking. At the end, it is now duller but still is a bit yellow in areas.after blastingafter blasting

Apparently the passivate soaks in and is quite difficult to get out. Now I am thinking - perhaps I don't need to get rid of it all as the new zinc plating will cover it up. So I am going to leave it as-is and see how it looks after plating. It may be too rough and the plating won't look good, but then I will just be back to start and have to put it on the grinder anyway... we will see!

For the plating, after watching a few YouTube videos, I feel I have the general idea but the specifics seem daunting. Percentages of specific products make a huge difference. So I thought I would get a kit. They have all the right parts and liquids and come with instructions!

I found a nice one from Chronos that included the yellow passivate in the kit and a good set of instructions. It wasn't cheap but seemed like it would get me everything I needed for dozens of parts.

https://www.chronos.ltd.uk/product/superbright-zinc-plating-kit-with-blue-yellow-passivate-2-litre/

It arrived and I was super stoked to open it up and it looks complete with everything I need.zinc plating kit

Unfortunately in my zeal to purchase I didn't think about the DC voltage supply. Coming from the UK, it has a different power plug...sigh. I could purchase an adapter but I opted to get another power supply....so now I am waiting on that to be delivered!UK power plug

Thanks! According to:

https://www.finishingsystems.com/blog/abrasive-blasting-media-guide/

Walnut seems like it is around the glass-bead for abrasiveness and its etching.... most likely a lot cheaper, sound like it may be a great product to help burnish the surface!

Quick update. Not a lot happening as I wait for tools and equipment. So I have been prepping the playfield. The "fill-in" phase is complete. Delaminating wood was glued and filled with liquid wood and sanded smooth.delaminated cornersglueing the laminations downholding it flat

The center holes were quite worn. After several rounds of wood fill and sanding, they are much better. I am worried the sanding is removing too much paint (note the before and after pics below) and I won't have any guidelines for repainting so although they are not absolutely perfect, they are pretty good and are a big improvement.Holes are pretty wornadding liquid woodsanding smoothfinished holes

Next up is sanding the old wood-finish areas to remove the cracks and worn areas.

Work progresses. I finished the upper right dancer. A lot of work especially in the reflections off the ice, lots of random shapes. I am not 100% sure the Cameo can handle all the tiny tiny lines but we will see. I will do the best I can.
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I turned my attention to the playfield in order to sand off the old cracked varnish and get the wood prepared for the new. The upper ball trail went away without too much trouble but there are a couple of stained areas in the center that don't seem to want to go away but I think it will still be ok.upper ball trail areaupper ball trail removed

original center areacentral area sandedcenter area before stain

Things were going well, I stained the bare wood areas and then laid down a couple of light coats of rattle-can clear to lock everything down in preparation for painting. Today, I sanded it lightly to hit the high spots and reduce the amount of variation in depth and laid down another coat of clear. Although I promised myself to do light coats, I got too greedy and went slower with the can than I should have. The result....orange peel...sigh

Its going to take a couple more sessions of sanding and LIGHT coats to get it ready for painting now...

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I have finished the playfield. I now have a 600dpi graphic of the original playfield ready to start cutting mylar with. Still a couple of days of sanding and spraying to get the playfield ready though.Ice Revue Resized Full Playfield (resized).jpg

That is correct. I actually made a video of the same process I followed on a Flash I did recently. It definitely shows I am not an expert in the Silhouette Studio software but fortunately the process is pretty straightforward assuming you have a decent graphic to send to the Cameo.

I have saved cutout masters for each playfield color..black cutout master

But I have run into a problem. The base colors are in large areas. I decided to start with the blue, it is primarily in the back of the playfield and if I screw up it won't be as noticable. But the amount of blue is enormous, far larger than my Cameo will cut. My cameo can cut the red square...lolScreenshot 2021-04-25 142943 (resized).png

It will have to be done carefully in multiple overlays, but I have never tried it and it might be too difficult to line them up... I've sent the cut images to the Cameo, we will see
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After cutting and weeding the blue stencil on the Cameo, I set it up on the playfieldcutting the stencilweeding the stencilmasked playfield

Then it was time for paint matching, fortunately I have several different blues of about the right color and it wasn't too hard to mix them up and get a perfect match (red circle)dufferent bluesperfect match

Painting is easy with an airbrush, a couple of coats and it was done.finished blue

Then comes the difficult part, removing the mask. Sadly even with 6 lockdown coats of paint, a massive amount of the old paint came up. The mask is so frustrating. I've used Oracal 651 and 813 and both have far too much sticky on them, I need something more like Post-It note level of sticky...sigh... I may be better off sanding it to bare plywood and doing a total repaint rather than attempting to match and add to the old stuff.old paint coming up

The blue looks good though...finished bluefinished blue

thanks for the heads-up, I've ordered some, I knew that frisket came in squares but I never thought it came in rolls for some reason.

Definitely... I use Spraymax and have had good results. If you look close you can see where the old paint was gone as the thickness varies, but for normal use it comes out great.

While waiting on frisket, I am experimenting with plating. I will posts some results soon.

The first pass of plating shows where my deficiencies are. Overall it worked but its not that impressive. I started with a couple of big washers which I sandblasted to look about like my part looks. You can see where the pliers were holding them in the blasting cabinet: the original parts

This shows my little assembly line setup. On the left in the glass dish is the cleansing solution. It is a 10% hydrocloric acid solution. I am nervous about it, it smells like acid and it bubbles the washer like crazy. nasty stuff.

Next is the grey plastic water for rinsing after the acid bath

Then comes the main event. the actual plating bucket

then another rinse bucket

On the right is the yellow passivate bucket. It needs to be around 80 degrees F so it has a aquarium heater in it.

Finally on the right is my DIY drying rack. The plated piece is supposed to be dried in hot air, so I set up my heater and a couple of cans of paint to hold it at the right height.my plating setup

I changed up the timing of my 2 attempts to see what the differences were. My attempts were timed at:

(both trials) 10 seconds acid bath

rinse

(trial 1) 5 minutes plating at 2V
(trial 2) 10 minutes plating at 3V

rinse

(trial 1) 90 seconds passivate
(trial 2) 120 seconds passivate

dry
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The results are ok but not overwhelming. The top 2 in the picture are the original sandblasted ones. The bottom left is the first trial, bottom right is second trial. This is before any polishing but surprisingly the first trial looks better.
first trialfirst trial

After polishing, they look a little better, almost as good as they did when I started this whole thing..lol
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What I have learned out of all of this is that the polishing/surface prep steps are really the key to making the final piece look good and I am not good at that part. I've read that people use steel wool for the final polishing rather than a wheel so I might try that but it will be a while before I get out all the stuff again. I have to the think about the practicalities of polishing all the nooks and crannies of the frame, it would be worth plating a piece that gets worn but for something like a frame holding some coils it might be easier to just spray on some paint.....

update. I tried again with a couple more washers. This time I used steel wool for the polishing. Pretty much the same result, a VERY slight yellow tinge and rainbow, a rough surface that is probably tin plated but certainly not very impressive.

I think I have 2 issues. The surface needs to be a lot more polished before (and after) in order to show anything
I am having trouble deciding if I am getting enough plating. Certainly, the tin plates in my kit show the results of the platingtin anode results

However I can't really tell if I am getting enough or that is the problem why it is not shiny.

Also, I am not sure about the Yellow Passivate. It came with explicit instructions not to exceed 120 seconds, however when I look at the "yellow" I am getting versus other people it is clear something is not right - the solution? The timing? The surface of the metal? the temperature? who knows.

My results, its hard to tell in the photo but there is a slight yellow and rainbow effect.my results

Other peoples results:other people plating

Back to painting. I have been having a lot of trouble. My airbrush just would not spray paint and I finally replaced it. The new one works but only intermittently. I spend 20 minutes cleaning and filling and cleaning and adjusting and cleaning and cursing for every coat of paint i manage to get on the playfield.

And i needed a lot of paint. The red apparently isnt as opaque as i had hoped as after 4 thick coats i can still see under it. For the next set of red areas I will do a white first I think.red is not opaque



The frisket i used for a paint mask came up without pulling any paint but left a bunch of goo all over the playfield. Hopefully it will come off without messing up the new paintfrisket leaving goo

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But at least I have a large portion of the central red done.red is done

I spent the day making slow progress. It took several hours to clean off all the goo left behind by the frisket. I am assuming I got a bad batch as few ever report having this problem. The goo would not come off with the flour method and I had to resort to goo-gone. But of course, that is a liquid and the paint is all water-based acrylic so a bunch rubbed off despite how careful I was.

When I finally got the playfield in a reasonable condition I cut out the white areas in the center in the Oracal 631 (low tac) and sprayed a set of white. Despite the 631 being a lower tac than the original 831 and 6 layers of clear and 4 layers of red/blue, I am still pulling up old chunks of paint....sighpulling up the old paint

However, Its 90% of tyhe way there and although needs a bit of touchup with a brush to get those spots, its looking bettercenter section almost done

3 weeks of curing of the clear. It seems the original paint isn't stuck to the wood very well any more. I should have sanded to bare wood but was worried about registration errors in the Mylar overlays. Oh well, I am going to fill with a paint brush and once I get a little further along I will spray some more lockdown clear

The clear can help gloss over some problems, but I am really unhappy with the playfield. I wanted this to look like a NOS or repro playfield, but it just doesn't. The paint thickness is an issue, the dried remnants from the frisket cleanup tends to hang around in the crevices of the paint edges making them look even more noticable, the paint is still lifting (new and old) - I am less and less happy about how its going.

I am thinking its time to sand it down to bare wood and do a real repaint... scary as there will not be any previous paint to use as a guide, but hopefully the end result will look better.

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I am going to take a hybrid approach - spray on more clear and sand most of it off and try to get it smoother and redo, but hopefully with still some of the old playfield still visible for reference purposes.

Its pretty amazing, the clear covers up a lot of problems, but I still want to get rid of the valleys.... looks better with clearstill a lot of valleys

plus I sprayed it on too thick and got fisheyes. Going to let it harden for a day or two and start sanding...fisheyes

Today I sanded down the playfield a lot flatter. It looks pretty bad as the slightly darker new red is in the valleys while the slightly lighter old red is everywhere else. But it is much flatter. A few coats of clear to (hopefully) lock it down and my replacement frisket should be arriving in a couple of days...then I can begin again!

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As stated above I put a bunch of lockdown coats of clear, sanded them lightly to remove some of the peaks and tried again.

I started with the red. This time I used a fresh roll of frisket and put a coat of white down first and then the red over the top. It looked really nice.white undercoatRed over the white

But once again, taking the frisket off did not leave any goo residue but resulted in pulling up old paint...pulling up old paintpulling up old paint

Its a real shame too, as the red looks really nice.red layerred layer

I don't really see any way to proceed