Hello! I've wanted a pinball machine since I was just a wee lad, but the spirit faded until I found out about PAPA. I'm an Englishman living in Pittsburgh, USA, and going to the PAPA open house kinda reinvigorated my love of pinball - and my wife was totally into it too, which is a bonus. I got on Craigslist and waited until something came up that was within my price range, and before too long, this ancient Williams Super Star appeared for two hundred bucks!

It's had water damage, 40,000-odd plays before the meter stopped working, and mice!

It was a solid week of work before it was mechanically sound. Every single stepper and reel was seized up tight, nearly every switch was filthy and misadjusted, a few wires had come unsoldered and had been simply wrapped around the lugs, and the chime box doesn't so much go DING as WUNK. The chime box is still broken. But it works! You can play a game and everything! I even - after fiddling with the coin mech wiring for hours before giving up hope of getting it working without modification - installed a patch wire to give one credit for one quarter. I have a friend with a restaurant, and the eventual goal is to have it out of my basement and on site, where it can dispense bite-sized chunks of fun for a quarter a pop.

So, now, time to turn my eye towards... if not "restoration," exactly, then "getting it looking at least marginally presentable."

These pictures follow me fixing the machine mechanically, applying melanine foam, cleaning with Novus and waxing, playing and tinkering for a week or so, then stripping it all down and doing another round of melanine foam and Novus 2. In short, this is what it looks like when it's clean.

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Honestly, I think the point of this post so far is to say "I picked a hell of a job for my first time, huh?"

Wish me luck!

I get the feeling I'm gonna need it.

Thanks for your warm welcomes, everyone. Particularly Jags - seeing your machine is inspiring. Also Jokercyclone, it's nice to see another expat here.

I know I've probably bitten off more than I can chew, here, but I just keep telling myself "Just do an hour here and there, and it'll be done before you know it." The most important thing going through my head is to accept imperfection. The machine is over 40 years old and it's been fed a steady diet of coins, beer, rodents, abuse and neglect. I'm a restoration amateur on a budget. It's never, ever, EVER going to look perfect, no matter what I or anyone else tries to do with it.

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I'm aiming for "Good," here. It's probably not gonna turn out excellent, it's DEFINITELY not gonna turn out perfect, but even if it just barely scrapes "Okay, I guess, for a first attempt," it'll be an improvement.

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That red portion of the target actually looks better in person. Some of the imperfections you see are down to the camera picking up more infrared than the eye, some of it is down to compression artefacts (always bad on red), and some of it actually is the red being a smidge uneven.

The dark blue really does look that bad, and needs another coat.

So. I've done a lot of research and I reckon I'm gonna go with Varathane for the clearcoat, as per the guide on pinrepair.com. Does anyone know where the hell to actually get hold of the stuff?!

Oh, and my experimental technique on the "UP RIGHT POST" text...

I knew it was gonna be very hard indeed to paint around the text, or to repaint it by hand. So I painted a thin white (actually buttermilk) undercoat, then a layer of red (the red on this table is hard to match - it's very, very bright. I ended up mixing Americana "true red" with Apple Barrel "Neon Orange," which is fluorescent. It worked pretty well!), and then, while there were few enough coats that the text was still faintly visible, I scraped out a couple of lines on the outlines of the letters with a hobby knife. One more coat to try to even out the portions that were heavily damaged, and then I scraped all the letters out. In the picture it's not quite finished, there's still some red on the letters and the playfield was very badly damaged here so they're gonna need a coat of black on them anyway, but it worked... not "well," but "okay."

Progress!

Just got the black keylines to do, and then I think I'll be ready for clearcoating.

I removed and sanded flat all of the cupped inserts (yup, they were all very concave). Now, a decision: all of these inserts were placed into the playfield waaaay off-center - do I repaint their lines the way they were so that they're off-center but match up with the keylines in the wood, do I try to subtly shift the lines so that they're a little more centered than from the factory, or do I just paint a circle around the inside edges of the inserts and call it good?

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Clear coating!

CLEAR COATING DISASTER. I ended up putting a load of very nasty fisheyes in this. My first coat was way too heavy, and I didn't pay close enough attention during preparation.

I used Krylon Crystal Clear - certainly not something you'd want to use on a modern machine, but there are a few folks who swear by it for these old electromechanicals. It's cheap, easy to apply, and it only stank up my basement for a couple of days.

I wiped down the playfield with Naptha before applying the stuff. I should have done that like three or four times, and possibly roughed it up a little, because those fisheyes really were nasty - I tried sanding them down, but ended up going through some of my touchups. I looked at what I'd done, and sulked for a while.

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I thought it was irreparable - but my old man back in England saw me moping on Facebook, looked at the pics, and went "Ah, just sand it down as much as you can, spray some really light coats over it to get a base to fill them in, and see where you go from there." So that's what I did, and in the end, it worked.

The job in the end wasn't perfect by any means, but I think it's pretty good for a first attempt - and my goal was to make it better than it was, and... well... look at those first pics. It'd be hard to make it worse than that.

Some residue from wet sanding made its way into the left-hand star and then somehow made its way into the clearcoat, giving it a slightly grubby look. I was bummed at first - but on reflection, I'm actually okay with it. The table's over forty years old - having the playfield look perfect would be anachronistic. As it is, some of the inserts weren't quite perfectly level, and I accidentally sanded through some of my black key lines, and there are a couple other little mistakes here and there - but looking at how it was when I started, I'm okay with that.

In all, this isn't perfect by any means, but it's a damn sight better than when I started, and I've learned some very useful things.

Here, have some gratuitous reflection shots.

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