Quoted from cfh:

I guess i could do a video about how we do plastics. but again, it would assume you have Photoshop, and have Photoshop skills. It's an expensive program! Frankly we use a really old version (v6), well before CSS version numbers. Because what we're doing with plastics isn't really that involved.
But after scanning at 300 dpi, you have to make sure the imported file keeps its size parameters. Otherwise you'll struggle with that! Also the scans are never clean. You need to "clean it up" in photoshop and do color correction and fix missing graphics, etc. Artistic liberties are sometimes taken for pieces that are missing!
Also i often modify the plastic too. A lot of plastics have thin areas that are prone to breakage. Perfect example is on F14 Tomcat, the top center plastic with the flasher domes. They ended up not using 2 flashers in that design, so i made those areas thicker. Still can use my version with 4 flashers, but it's just less prone to breakage because the areas are thicker. Another one i modified was on Creature. That cadillac plastic on the left... we modified that into two plastics, so it's less prone to breakage. and if it does break, we can easily replace it.
I should also mention that to complicate things even more, often there are pieces riveted to a broken plastic. Those have to be removed before scanning obviously. Then after the new plastics is made, re-rivet the piece(s) back in place. We have a rivet press so it's not a huge deal. But you would be surprised at the number of plastics that have flasher domes or little signs riveted to the main plastic. It's another level of complication...
I should point out that we are *not* making plastics for anyone but us. by copyright laws we can do this for our own games. to avoid any issues, we don't make plastics for others. Well, that's not entirely true. I mean "the law" is part of our club and he needed some plastics for his games, and i helped him out. New pinball magic stage doors, a couple meteor plastics (for a $400 meteor i hooked him up with), and those super thin right ramp Whirlwind plastic surrounds (which are always broken). But other than that, really have not done any plastics for others, because of the issues involved.
So how did we get here? i mean what was the push to make this all happen? Well, we're working on a custom game, and plastics had to be created for that. This is what pushed the entire process. After we experimented with a zillion different ideas on how to do plastics, we landed with this. We were quite happy with the results (coming up with something that was cost efficient and not overly complicated). Then we just went through all the 400 games at the museum, and figured out we had a crap load with broken plastics....