Reassembly is satisfying work. I love the steady forward progress of putting things together. In the middle of a job it can feel like you’re not really going anywhere (especially when having trouble with color matching and the like on playfield restorations.) Reassembly is just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other and being able to see what you did after a few hours. It’s great. 090038DF-D1F3-4A38-8E18-38D4BFA31309 (resized).jpeg
I didn’t take photos of the step where I cleaned up the coin door; I always disassemble them down to their component parts, sand out any flaky paint, hit the parts with primer, then with textured spray paint, and finally with a matte clear topcoat. At one point I had tried getting a coin door powder coated, but some parts simply would not accept the finish. The guy doing the coating chalked it up to just very low grade metal, which sounded about right to me. SonI went home, got out the spray cans, and was blown away by how good it looked. I’ve never looked back, and now I kind of dislike dealing with coin doors that *aren’t* painted black!
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Another non-photographed step was making new playfield rails. My shop was initially built around cabinet making, so cranking out new wooden rails is pretty quick work. I’m baffled as to why pin manufacturers used those absurd contact-paper wrapped rails; it seems like way more trouble than it’s worth, but that’s bean counters for you. For black rails I use european beech because it’s very hard and non-porous, so it takes paint nicely. I use ash for blonde rails; Warlok had blonde rails, but to me this playfield seemed to call out more for black, so I made the executive decision to go that route instead. A purist I am not.
One last project that I needed to tend to before this was ready to wrap up was the apron. The apron was in decent shape, but had some ugly scratches that I thought I could clean up. Some Frisket film and Createx paint did the trick!
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The last graphic art project that remained was to make some custom rule cards. Since I had the playfield graphics scanned into the computer, it was a simple matter to use Illustrator to tweak the playfield art for a nice design.
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