Great thread, so good I bought a machine to practice on, a Bally Eight Ball. It has nice simple colours for the most part. Somebody decided to hand paint some poor looking patches around the racked balls near the bottom and add some mylar. The mylar is now coming up and has lots of paint attached to it.

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Also, somebody decided to pull up the mylar against the slingshot so the paint could get worn off for some reason. I have a couple of questions for approaching this.

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I guess I need a fairly big decal across the balls. Should I cut it into smaller pieces to make them manageable?
Do I sand everything off in that area and level the inserts with clear (all the inserts are nice and even with the playfield but are cupped)?
How do I do the sanding across the racked balls area to stop precisely on the narrow bare wood strip around the balls?
This machine has a nice black trench dug in through the clear coat at the top area. I think you addressed this earlier but I cannot find it now.

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Again, enjoying the thread immensely.

Scanning is next on my list, just waiting for an eBay purchase to arrive. Once I sand everything a bit, then I need to clear. Does clear have to be end cleanly at the edge of the repair area or can it feather in beyond the repair area? I am used to working on cars and wet sanding things. If I have to repair a chunk in the wood, is there a particular brand of body filler you prefer?

What if the chunk is deep like this where the saucer has been plopping the ball for years. Fill with body filler, clear then decal or just paint this by hand? Again can I clear the local area only or will I have to clear everything? The rest of the playfield is quite nice and in I would like to leave it alone if possible.

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Vid1900,

Maybe I missed it but let's say I strip a playfield down with the intention of clearing it. What do I have to do to decontaminate it so the clear is not messed up. Playfields will have years waxes, and other chemicals on them. I saw you mention acetone to remove wax. Will the acetone do a good job without risk to the existing paint?

Assuming I now have a clean surface, I should rough up everything with 220 grit then lay clear on that? I have to say that I will have a lump in my throat the first time I try it.

My Eight Ball repair might take a different path for now. I found someone who had digitally repaired all the artwork and found a company who printed it onto a sanded down original playfield. This playfield is missing it's inserts so that would be job one. Since there is a lot of bare wood (mostly at the top of the field on Eight Ball), is there any special prep to be done before laying clear down? The reason I ask is that unlike printed areas, the wood fibers will stand up and require sanding down. This means waiting a long time between coats I assume? How did the factory do this?

What kind of safety equipment are people using for spraying clear? The local body supply shop sold me a dual cartridge mask but the clear definitely says to use a positive pressure supplied air system. I watched some YouTube videos where a guy was spraying with just a dust mask which seemed crazy.

Hope his lungs hold up.

For fun I decided to try out my new HVLP gun using something more safe, water based Varathane. I had a heck of a time setting the gun up? I thinned the stuff down quite a bit with water but I found it hard to check the spray pattern since it was so clear. I really am not ready to spray a playfield that is for sure. Any tips on pressures and settings?

I keep forgetting, what type of paint do people spray cabinets with?

Definitely do not underestimate the danger. The effects can be time delayed by hours and guy in another thread said he passed out the next morning. ~20% of the population are susceptible and there is only one way to find out if you are in that group.

I discovered that the consumer aimed products are safe because the isocyanates are prepolymerized and do not wind up in the air even when you spray it, not to say you don't still need a good mask. The catalyzed stuff for cars is curing during spraying and the airborne stuff is nasty.

Just to clarify what I wrote, of course it gets in the air when you spray it, but the polymers in the consumer stuff is mostly cured and therefore less toxic. The solvent it is floating in boils away and gets in the air but is safer than the automotive stuff whose polymers are still curing as you spray it. Cyanide should be respected. Some people are pretty casual about it for some reason.

The other problem with masks is people don't really do the fit checks properly. Placing your hands over the cartridges and inhaling should mean you get no air, just vacuum. Any leaking air means you are breathing fumes. If you can smell the chemicals while using it, you are way over the safe limit. Human noses are not good enough as a safety measure in this case.

You have plenty of compressor and nobody can spray at 100% duty cycle for more than a few minutes anyway. You might use the equivalent of 4-5 CFM averaged out over many minutes of use. You have line and regulator losses and things not included in that 11 CFM but either way, that is going to work fine.

I am have an Eight Ball playfield. Where the racked balls are someone had done poor touch ups by hand and then covered it all with Mylar. When I got it the Mylar was lifting. To my surprise when I started pulling up the mylar, it also pulled the original clear coat with it, and a lot of the original paint too. That was a surprise to me since outside of this area the playfield looks quite good. Is this normal?

I was wondering about adhesion of 2pac to decals. I have read the whole thread and I understand the purpose of 2pac underneath and on top of the decal. Is this true once you scale the decal's size up? Some people have been talking about some pretty large decals. You clear, then sand, then apply the decal, then more clear. You cannot sand the decal itself so the clear on top is laying on a shiny smooth plastic. Wouldn't this cause trouble in the case of a large decal?

Okay, that and its obviously well proven to work.

Different question, I have been thinking of getting a playfield printed on a flat bed printer. I know its been tried and I heard of an issue with clearing it where the clear ate the UV cured ink. Has anyone on this thread done this? I know Vid mentioned barely spraying decals initially to prevent eating them. I wonder if that approach will work for a printed playfield. I am a bit surprised that such clear coat being so active does not attack the Creatix paints at all.

http://www.edcheung.com/album/album07/Pinball/ss_pfb.htm

I had a test print of my artwork done on a high quality paper but on the same flatbed printer. I am waiting for a test print being done on a wooden panel I made up. Mostly I want to be able to assess colours but it gives me a whole piece to practice clearing on.

Vid in all your posts here, I do not recall what you said you use for breathing protection when you do clear, do you use a air supply system?

If you know anyone who flies RC planes they will often have a wing covering iron. I have this one http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXHZ17&P=ML Variable temperature and comes with a fabric sock for the shoe to do what you want.

I would also vote for stack effect sucking air through the many crevices around doors and don't overlook the wall sills not being sealed to the concrete foundation or even a lack of vapour barrier. There are many possibilities.

Sherwin Williams has Naptha, they call it VAPM Naptha (Varnish and Paint Makers). I bought a 4Litre jug in Ottawa.

<Oops, beat me to it.>

My experience is the same, definitely dries darker than what I mixed as a liquid. I am very new to colour matching so I have been trying to make samples and dry them as I go to see the real colour.

In my case it dried darker when applied to a clear piece of plastic. On white I got the same result.

Someone in Pennsylvania is a Toronto fan? What game did you start with? Are you going to be making a backglass as well?

I can see the rather obvious touch ups but what is the source of the skinny little streaks everywhere, were they not there previously?

Cyanoacrylate glues tend to fog clear plastics. It will go on just fine and just as it cures everything near it will haze.

I was starting with an Eight Ball playfield that the previous owner had taken all the inserts out of for some reason. I bought new ones and roughened all of them on the perimeter and added a groove around periphery for the adhesive to key into. To bond them in place I used a modeling 2 part epoxy. TowerHobbies http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXPT44&P=ML

You can save some time by printing out colour swatches. Make them big enough to use like 1"x1". I fold up the sheet or cut out samples and hold them next to the colours I want to match. This only gets you so far as the decal white is different than the white of the paper you print on. Also if you are doing a clear decal, you have whatever white paint under it to work with. If printing on clear, I paint a piece of board stock with my white paint, print my colour swatches on a clear sheet of plastic (no need to waste an actual decal), lay the plastic onto the white painted board and compare against the thing you are trying to match.

I know I have seen the answer elsewhere in the thread but I cannot find it. I just had a playfield cleared by a local collision shop. How long do I need to wait before sanding and buffing like was done on page 27 of this thread?

Mylar lifting.

I am sure it is the thread somewhere but I cannot find it. I have several arrow inserts than seem sunken in the PF and the mylar (that is in great shape generally) has lifted off. You can flex it up and down where it hovers over the arrows. There is no tackiness left at all. The mylar is attached fine to the whole PF. So unlike a ghosted insert, what can I do to re-adhere the mylar?

I was wondering if something could be injected to re-wet the mylar and remove the haze like is done with the ghosting earlier in the thread.

Naptha cleanup up of Novus 2 takes quite a bit of work. Do a first pass, change rags before doing a second pass. Getting it all off will take a bit of effort.

Same as on a car, as long as it is only in the clear layer, wet sand it out. I would start at 1000 grit. Go up through to 2000-2500. Use a compound to remove the haze and done.

If it is wear in the clear, then nothing can clean it out. Do these marks catch your finger nail? If it is indeed a deposit of some sort then a mild abrasive like Novus 2 will take it off. Anything abrasive will haze the clear slightly so keep the rubbed area as small as possible.

And after you're done you have a still.

Way back in the chip filling section, how do you spread filler and squeegee it off and not mess up the surrounding artwork. I plan to put a decal over the missing artwork but it needs to be level. This is the only damaged area so I am not planning to clear it. I will be putting Mylar over the repair since the rest of the Playfield has original Mylar.

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I am going to ask a dumb question but bear with me. If I want to drip liquid clear into a depression (see 4 posts up) is liquid clear still unsafe indoors to use? I would not be spraying, just using an eye dropper.

Not sure about Game Plan but Bally fired a lot of long staples in despite having lots of predrilled screw holes. So if it is stuck it can be staples or just glued down to the clear.

Not to deny 2PAC's benefits, I am wondering though what poly was used. They are not all the same. The traditional oil based stuff nowadays is sold as turning amber, I guess some people want that when used on wood. I have tried the outdoor UV protected stuff and it does go on very clear. They sell it as a product that resists yellowing which of course is a relative thing. In Home Depot in Canada there is oil based, and water based with water based coming in an indoor type and an outdoor UV resistant type.

The first time I tried frisket (on a cabinet) it pulled off a whole layer on me. Try sticking frisket down over and over and let it do the work. In my case it worked great, completely removed the offending layer.

I don't know what is special with the Treasure Cove kit but I just use a cordless drill with a headlight kit foam pad and play with various compounds. I have done it three different way and wound up with pretty similar good results. I have used boat hull compound which is a 3M product it did a pretty good job, the grit progressively breaks down as you go so it covers the range of 2-3 other normal compounds. I also tried Novus 3 as my starting point but found it was not quite aggressive enough.

A lot of the flow out occurs as your spray lands. The aerosolized clear will cool very rapidly if it is sprayed through cold air. It will not matter that the gun is warm and that the PF is warm. I don't think you will like the result.

The before and after photos look great. I assume you airbrushed the various numbers and letters, did you let them dry then pull the stencil or spray and pull right away? Curious what give the best result.

Only if the glass will be touching the thing your scanning. The scanner has a tiny focal length. Pull the object away from the glass and the image becomes very fuzzy quickly.

Not to sidetrack the restoration thread too far (although this is certainly relevant). For a backglass you need to stitch good quality photos together and work out the effective dot pitch you wind up with. Printing should be no worse than 300 dpi, so do your work at 400 dpi or better and downsample at the end if you need to. You can use almost any camera if the lighting is good and most importantly you undo the lens distortion. There are many programs out there that can help. iPhones have very distorted images (take an image of graph paper then pull it in to PhotoShop and you will see). Undistort the images then stitch those together you can do a very nice job.

Even the HP scanners listed above are not perfect, they have scaling issues in them particularly at the edges of the scan. If you can only use the middle 75% of the scans you are better off which requires more overlap. I spend a good several hours correcting the poor job PhotoShop does, it is only meant to give good results for photos, it does not do better than several pixels which can greatly misalign things like key lines.

On mine, I removed the few screws that were there and then from the side flexed the whole side rail outward. This self-levers the rail up a bit on the staples. The lets you get under the rail without crushing its square edge. The rails are also partly stuck down from having been pressed down onto the original clear layer, but it just pops free.

You can get decals for the customers, http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/CA-50C

We might want to start a metal working restore thread and link to it here. My experiments with this broke down to attempting to get a mirror look and not being quite happy with it. Hammered door dents out, door looked awesome but not enough of a mirror. So I tried various things and settled on 100 grit (sounds rough I know) stroked in very straight lines to get the depth of cut I wanted. Followed that with 600 grit wet (again straight), to knock down the 100 grit texture. Final result was perfect with a slightly finer brush finish than original but much nicer looking. Total 100 and 600 grit time was maybe 10 minutes versus hours of making the mirror finish.

I use this scanner with Win10, just install the 64 bit Vista driver. You get really simplistic controls though which is fine for me. It takes a few tries the first time, but you trigger the scan from the device and it pops up an import window. You have to do whole page scans but you can set resolution.

Are you powering the scanner when you plug it in or just inserting the USB. The scanner needs to be on. What OS are you using? I had problems on a Win7 laptop having it recognize it and it turned out the USB ports on the right side were the problem but the left side worked.

Not sure what you mean, USB 3 is expressly intended to be backwardly compatible with USB 2, you can plug devices into whatever you want if it fits. USB C is different though. In my case it would not work in my USB 2 ports, it would only work in the USB 3 port even thought the scanner is USB 2.

When you power yours up, does it turn on the light and wiggle the scan bar a couple of times? That is what mine does. Also in Win10 I have no way to trigger a scan in the computer. I trigger it from the scanner and the first time it is connected it takes a good solid minute, long enough to convince me it is broken. Subsequent scans in that session start within seconds.

How many hours of cure time did it have before you started populating it? Seems strange it is so soft.

Are you printing the blue? CMYK printing is pretty narrow in the range of blues you can achieve. The tend towards purple no matter what you try.

That appears to be screwed down not glued. Remove it and shim to desired height.

It would depend on the amount you are shimming. The flat style toothpicks might be good, they can be sanded to whatever thickness.

Was the original surface sanded to provide tooth?

I spend quite a bit of time figuring out which settings I need to set to get something to scale when printed. Lots of programs scale to fit when you don't think they are. Always use a chunk of image that is well within your page size while figuring it out.

The 2K risk is not really a cancer problem, it is an acute poisoning problem. I would be surprised if anyone has managed to get enough low doses without being sick that they actually got cancer from it. Regular spray paints won't poison you as quickly so you can get doses over time and some of the chemicals definitely cause cancer.

Are you planning to put some colour on top of the patch? I would be reluctant to use super glue, it won't build up and remain clear easily. If you are top coating it with a colour then epoxy wood filler would work well.

Great summary. Would you mind mentioning your actual paint process? What kind of paint and or gun you use (thinking of the artwork, not the clearing process).

Excellent work. I know first hand how hard it is to do all that work and all the effort required. Very nice looking result.

I am guessing your scanner glass is not right on the surface? Scanners have a very small focus depth and any gap between your object and the glass gives you blur.

Keep in mind those 'mistakes' were not in the artist's original work. Those offsets are due to poor alignment during the silk screening of the playfield. The artist drew something then colour filters were used to photograph the artwork to make a negative used to create each colour screen. Every colour screened is a chance to have a misalignment. If redoing a lot of artwork I would repair any I could but definitely not worth it in a small repair.

I have polished mylar on multiple machines, makes a huge difference. I use a drill and foam pad like the photo above. Generally, the compound that works best is not obvious. I have used Novus 2 and 3 successfully. I had a 3M fibreglass boat hull compound that worked the best. It was a progressive compound where the grit breaks down and becomes finer and you continue. I clean up with Novus 1. I strip the playfield back as much as I can, I tape off some unprotected areas in case my pad has to span off the edge of the mylar. You can bring the mylar back to close to new.

Looks very nice.

That is not really an insert cracking problem, it is the insert expanding and contracting a bit differently from the wooden playfield and the effect cracks the clear at the boundary. When new the clear spans the transition but with the movement happening there it cracks. This will happen on any machine. The problem is if the inserts start to work their way up and an edge forms that the ball then chips away at. Is everything level? The only practical solution is mylar at this point but if everything is level there is nothing to really protect.