I use these to mix small amounts of 2PAC for little jobs.

https://www.amazon.com/300-Count-Disposable-Medicine-Measuring/dp/B09LZBY66S/ref=sr_1_1_sspa

When doing epoxy I get rid of bubbles with a torch, the heat generated as I get close up yo the piece of wood removes the bubbles. Wondering if this trick would also work with clear.

I used this stuff doing inserts on Seawitch, tricky and takes a few days to get good and hard but did work well.

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Finished the playfield for Big Deal.
Not perfect but it was my first

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Looks very nice.

I think it looks great!

Thank you! Appreciate the kind words. I've spent far too much time on this. I think it's time to move on.

Looks fine ... you should be proud

When spraying isocyanates, is a full hood with a supplied air system enough protection? Or do I also need to wear a respirator with chemical cartridges under it?

Full hood, Tyvek suit, nitrile gloves. That do it?

Seems quite a lot for a pf…
I see professional painting cars with just a suit and mask…
What am I missing here.

Very early stages of tearing down and fixing up a Dirty Harry I got. Any recommendations on how to fix this area around the back right magnet?

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I’m building a spray booth and I want proper PPE that is easy to get into and comfortable. You guys in Ottawa wear a mask to eat a cheeseburger and youre giving me shit for trying to be safe spraying clear? Really?

Lol. Good one.
Not really, I was just making an observation.
If a pro that paints cars everyday is not using all that, why would you.
The observation being, which one is correct? Your system or theirs?

I am honestly asking

I use an air supply now when painting, much safer.

I’m not pro so I don’t know for sure. I have read isocyanates do not leave your body easily and it’s bad stuff. I know some people wear less PPE because a pro downdraft booth takes care some of the fumes (I wouldn’t). Some people just don’t care and live to be 100.

Im still young and have five kids to feed so I’m careful. I even wear chem masks when I use Naptha or lacquer thinner, and N95 masks when I sand or run my shop tools.

I do know a full hood is a lot easier to work in. Easier to take on/off, you don’t get that sweaty rubber mess on your face, etc.

Even wearing a quality 3M mask with new proper filters I'd get a raging headache after.

Face mask with shop air? Perfect, no more headache.

Wondering what kins of costs are we looking at here for this type of ppe, as I would want to be fully protected as well as I agree, a professional booth must be more efficient at removing the mist/overspray than my 4th world country improvised booth.

Is the magnet as mushroomed as it looks?

Robert

Yikes!
Looks reparable, but you want to get it just right. It looks like the magnet post is below the playfield surface, when it should be flush or a tiny bit above. (Apologies in advance if I’m spelling out things you already know.) You want to be sure to file that rod smooth and flat, and round the corners when it goes back in, as well as making sure it’s adjusted to the correct height.

The plywood damage really sucks. You might be able to glue down some of it, but there’s no avoiding some epoxy or fiberglass resin repair in to restore the surface.

I would:
Get the playfield completely disassembled and cleaned up.
Scan this area.
Restore the wood around the hole. Opinions vary, including my own, but one approach would be to wrap waxed paper around a dowel to stuff the hole with something, then pour in some fiberglass resin. You only want a little bit; maybe put your waxed paper cylinder so that it come up to 1/16” below playfield surface. Once that’s hardened, drill through it with a small drill bit step up to a larger one until you get to where you can ream it out with a tapered reamer and/or sandpaper around a piece of dowel.
You’ll need to get the interior cleaned out well, then sand the surface flush. You will damage the art in this process (you could spray clear before the fiberglass to minimize sanding damage, but I question how well the fiberglass will grab onto clear coat), but once the hole is reestablished, you’ll start repairing the graphics.

Once the clear is down, you can either:
Mask and spray the yellow, clear again, then put down a water slide decal with only the red dots and black lettering, then clear on top of that
Or:
Make a decal using *white* decal paper which has the whole image - yellow, red, and black. These are usually harder to pull of as they are more difficult to blend in with the surrounding art. I’ve done this in certain applications, but the situation kind of has to be just right. Airbrushing remains a very powerful tool.

All that said, this is totally doable, and you’re helped by the fact that it’s a tucked away ball path, not right in the center of the playfield, so even if you don’t get a perfect blend it probably won’t matter once everything is put back together. But if you’re anything like me, you’ll still bothered if the repair is noticeable in any way, lol.

Don't know if I'd trust the dudes down at Maaco with health advice.

Yes, no idea how it got to be so bad.

Thank you so much. I'm in the process of getting it down to bare wood now. Will update on progress.

Ha, I've read this before and apparently missed this line that answers my question:

"If you start clearing playfields all the time, it makes sense to switch to a full hood that supplies outside air . The $350 cost of the hood will pay for itself in replacement cartridges and it is much more comfortable to wear."

Thanks!

Is there a preferred hood people are using?

Yea

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I just did a cursory search for “supplied air respirators” and got products that ranged from under $200 to over $1,000.
I’d love to know more about this. I’ve never looked into it and would welcome hearing from someone who knows the subject.

I am not an expert, but this is what I have found.

The two practical ones I have seen (for the past ten years) are Hobby Air and Breathe-Cool.

These units simply pump air from the location the box is placed, through a hose, and into your hood/mask. They create positive pressure in the mask/hood so no outside air can come in. You need a hose long enough to reach a location with good air, and you need a unit strong enough to push air through that length of hose. Breathe-Cool makes their own unit and will cut you a hose of any length. Hobby Air seems to offer hoses in 40ft increments.

You can get either unit with a mask or a full hood. My buddy showed me his system with a full hood and I must have one. No sweaty rubber mask on your face, no adjusting the mask strap, no worrying about perfect seal. Hood is the way to go.

You still need a suit rated for ISOs, nitrile gloves and possibly something covering your feet.

I will probably buy the Breathe-Cool with 100ft hose. For several years I used a homemade unit with a half mask and it was great.

Supplied air respirators are a full face shield respirator that completely covers the face.

They have an air line hook up to it. You connect the air line tube into a rechargeable battery back that clips onto a belt around the waist. The battery pack powers a fan that makes filtered fresh air that is pumped into the mask so you can breathe clean air while spray painting. The air also makes it so the mask never fogs up and it also keeps you cool.

I used mine for spraying busses. I loved it for keeping me cool and also preventing the mask AND my glasses from ever fogging up, esp on hot summer days.

When pish came to shove and I wanted to be done ASAP with the least clean up, I'd just use my carbon filtered respirator mask. This was esp true in the winter time, but in the summer, the supplied air respirator was awesome for keeping you cool and preventing fogging of the mask and glasses.

Currently working on a pair of Stern “Lightning” playfields.
I don’t know who it was who decided it would be nifty to have little accent lines *within* the key lines back in the day, but I’d like to throttle that person. Then, even more sadistically, the lettering is white *on top of* black?

Good god.

I really struggled with how to tackle this, but landed on a really good and elegant and almost efficient solution.

One option would be to make stencils, and airbrush the black, followed by the white, and finally the little yellow band. But that would demand *perfect* placement of all three stencils - difficult when using Gerbermask - and if you missed, you have to start all over. So, it would be only prudent to lock down each layer with its own coat of clear.
But that would be a lot of extra steps.

Our old pal water slide decals came to the rescue.

I made one sheet of white decals sized exactly to the original key lines (drawn in AI from my scans). I used white so that the yellow band wouldn’t just disappear. It also helps make the black more opaque. These were printed from and cut by the Sihouette.
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The cutter does a nice job, but it can never be *that* precise, to you end up with these little white edges. That’s OK, because we deal with that next.
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The second set of decals is printed on clear water slide paper, and the black area is slightly heavier than the previous run of decals. This set of decals is just big enough to cover all of those pesky white lines. The Silhouette cuts these, but I offset the cut by 1/64” so that I didn’t have to worry about the decals being undersized at any point (if the cutter was at all off center, as inevitably happens if you have it cut exactly, as we saw with the white decals.)
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Now the numbers go on. These were again printed from and cut by Silhouette, using opaque decal paper. I yellowed the white just slightly so that it wouldn’t *pop* too much against the rest of the whites on the playfield. These are quite fussy to position, but a steady hand and a gentle dab of the paper towel and they set nicely. A528D138-AF31-4CD8-8B20-3792F0AC3768 (resized).jpegAE7907FF-246E-4DA1-BFB5-62EA7C513838 (resized).jpeg

This was a lot of effort to figure out, but next time I have to do a classic Stern with this detail, I know exactly what to do, and have the files ready to go to print out more.
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Really nice work!

Yeah, just excellent. Thanks for sharing.

Looks amazing.

Turned out very nice indeed, but if you have a cutter, why did you not create masking templates, airbrush the yellow and overlay (print) the black? This would avoid having the white edges around the outline of the text right?

I couldn't see the up side to doing it that way. I thought about it and even started down that path, but then the following things became apparent/occurred to me:

- it's *really* time consuming to do it that way. You end up having to mask every single step of it individually. In theory, you would mask the whole area, all the keylines at once. In practice, you can't every register that many different things and get them all aligned, or at least *I* can't. The masking is too stretchy, and too tacky. It is possible to reposition it against a wet surface, but let's just say my confidence in that wasn't so high.
- Once you get one layer of paint done, you'd then need to align the next layer *perfectly* over the first. It's hard enough to align stencils for key lines (though I do like using black spray for this as it is nice and opaque), but to then have to align the white over the black and the yellow over the black...I didn't think I was gonna be able to do that perfectly this many times. Also, the gerbermask I use for stencils is an opaque product, making alignment that much harder. If they made a clear version that would be great, but alas...
- Because getting it perfect was so iffy, and taking into consideration that if you blow it, you have to wipe out *all* of what you have done and start from scratch, the only prudent way forward would be to do the black base layer, then shoot clear, do the yellow lines, then shoot clear, and do the white lettering, then shoot clear. Using decals in this way meant crushing this whole phase of work in one pass.

Also, did I mention I am doing two of these at the same time?
So if I can avoid any extra steps along the way, that's hugely advantageous.

Tearing down my F-14 for a hardtop install, but now I’m looking at it thinking maybe I should restore this PF instead. What do you guys think? I will be replacing all the arrow inserts.

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Do it! I did this playfield a few years ago, it really wasn’t so bad. Glueing in inserts is the hardest part.

Just curious if having multiple layers of waterslide decals could potentially result in clear separation down the road. Has there been any precedent or experiences of this happening to anyone attempting this multi-layer decal technique, or repairs requiring larger decals?

That looks very restorable. Hardtops are cool for a totally blown pf. I wouldn't sand down anything with that much paint still attached. If you mess up the restore then go HT.

According to @vid1900, the decals essentially dissolve into the clear, binding to it chemically. From experience, it isn’t like they completely dissolve to where you can’t see the outline of the decal if you look for it, but I have no reason to doubt that his advice is sound. As for stacking decals, I spoke with a representative from a decal paper manufacturer just this week, seeking advice for getting maximum black print onto the water slides. They specifically recommend stacking if you need extra color depth. That said, I didn’t ask about interaction with clear coat. What I *can* tell you is that I restored an F114 Tomcat in 2018 using double layered decals for the inserts and it looks as good today as it did 4 years ago. I also did a ST:TNG which had damage across the inserts in the same way, and the owner has not reported any issues. It seems to me like the decals are pretty stable in between those clear layers.

Yeah that’s how I’m feeling. I hate dealing with halftones but otherwise it’s not a tough restore.

The nice thing about this, from what I can tell in this photo, is that your worst repair area (lower right) is fairly isolated - it has hard edges to stop at. That’s ideal.

The best tool I know of for dealing with halftones is the halftone brush plugins available in photoshop. These are pressure sensitive, so you really want a digital drawing pad or an Apple Pencil or other such tool when using them. I use an XP-Pen, which is on the more inexpensive end of the spectrum, though I often wish I’d ponied up for a Wacom.

My unsolicited advice to you would be to do *both* sides, even though the left hand looks pretty clean. I say this because there is no way you will ever get a perfect halftone pattern to match the existing one. It will be a really great looking repair if you go ahead and use frisket to mask off the area on both sides, spray down blue, clear, then apply two mirrored black halftone decals.
In theory you could actually accomplish all of this with a single decal printed on white water slide paper, and I’d be inclined to give it a try, but it’s more of a sure fire thing to use the two step method. From what can be seen in the photo, this playfield is well worth the effort. Yours is in better shape than mine was, in fact.

I just tried this before going the route of buying different clearcoat for spot fills, and your tip worked well. Only a few bubbles showed up in the spot fills I did with the Spraymax unlike the hundreds of bubbles last time. The trick is to definitely spray very slowly into a vial, took me several minutes to fill up probably 1/4th ounce.

I’m not great at dusting the larger decals but I’ll give it another shot! Excited to get to work on this one, it was the first pin I bought. It’s been super reliable and it’s actually a really clean game, very few hacks.

I’m going to add in Steve’s original flashers too.

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It really does work pretty good, just takes a little patience.

I am going to install a vinyl covered overlay on the fully sanded playfields of a Flash Gordon. What should I use for a clearcoat on the bare wood prior to overlay installation? I'd prefer something in a spray can as I do not have a compressor and spray gun equipment. How long should I wait before the overlay can be installed? Any other suggestions?

Thanks, Alan

The full vid1900 way is provides a far superior result, but here is how I do mine quickly and cheaply.

Quick version: Take a picture of target area, go to hobby store and color match as best as possible 5-10 shades close to the target, paint a piece of clear plastic with colors, once dry hold colors over playfield and pick closest, paint using wood toothpicks for fine work, put on some clear (if wanted), use magic eraser to dull touched up area to match playfield gloss.

Step 1: Identify the colors that you need. Instead of trying to mix colors “the right way”, I take a picture of the section in question and go to the arts and crafts store, Michael’s or Hobby Lobby in my area. I grab 5-10 samples of the color I am trying to match as close as I can match it to the color on my playfield. These colors run $1-$2 per.

Step 2: Paint small samples onto a piece of clear plastic and let it dry. I use a sandwich bag. Please note that cheap paints like this almost always dry a slightly different color. I paint a number and then a blotch of paint under it, and keep a list of what numbers correspond to which color.

Step 3: Take the dried paint samples to your pinball machine laying them over the playfield in the colors you want to match. Move the samples around until you find the closest color match. Get a friend to give a second opinion if at all possible. Note that women have better color vision than men.

Step 4: I generally start the touchup by doing a first pass of the black areas. When doing the fine detailed work with black, I have found that a cheap bottle of Americana gloss black from the hobby store works great applied with a wooden toothpick. I freehand the black areas. If I am a little too thick I can go over it with the colored paint below for corrections.

Step 5: It is time to start painting color. I will generally try and paint no more than about a 8.5x11 inch square at a time. Luckily for me this was the only area on the playfield that needed touchup. A cheap brush works great for the larger areas, but I use wooden toothpicks for fine detailed work. Paint the colors first, and finish up with black last after letting the colors dry for a few minutes.

Step 6: In addition to the large bare spots, the smaller spots can be filled in with paint applied via toothpick. Note that the bare area is slightly shallower than the painted area. After painting, lightly rub these small areas with a paper towel… lightly, to wipe away the excess paint and leave paint only in the bare area. This also works for the border areas of the larger bare spots.

Step 7: Do another pass around the black where necessary making the lines thicker where necessary. In doing it this way you have 3 tries on getting the black right and it generally looks better. You can always keep trying until it is perfect.

Step 8: I have found that the black around many inserts often has that slightly cracked with a little bit of white in it look. Go over these white crack spots with black paint via the toothpick method. I never “seal” these, but the black paint mostly lasts for hundreds of plays here.

Step 9: Allow the paint to dry (a few hours for water based hobby paint). From here you can play a bit and see if you like the overall look and feel of your newly painted playfield. You can stop here and wax your playfield, and in general home use your paint will slowly wear out over hundreds of plays. It will look good for you and you will enjoy your pinball machine (who are you fixing this for?). Make sure and write down what colors you used so if you want to make it permanent you can.

Step 10: If you want to make your touchup permanent you can apply a bit of touch up clear and let it cure. I used something I got in a trade in a small bottle but people have used automotive clear and there are extensive pros and cons in vids guide. You need to let the stuff cure overnight at minimum, longer if possible. I put a box fan over mine when I do this. Put the clear only on the spots you have touched up as it will protect those areas but make them “shiny”. Alternatively if its a small but high wear area such as an outlane with a kickback or by the pops, you can drop a piece of mylar cut to the area over the touchup.

Step 11: Match the clear glossiness. The real trick to making everything look nice is to have the clear match the glossiness of the original playfield. I use magic eraser and slowly dull the cleared area until it matches the glossiness of the original playfield. If your original playfield is already full of ball swirls, this will make things blend in very nicely.

Step 12: Wax the machine! You will want to make sure all surfaces on the playing field have the same top protective layer to make the

This is the “good enough for me” version that can be done in a few hours for under $20 that I'll actually do.

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