Hi folks, I got this Gulfstream some months ago, had other plans for it but no time. I decided to set it up and see what condition it was in. Turns out to be in pretty good mechanical shape - had to replace the kick-out-hole shield on left, tighten up the flippers, and replace a few bulbs, but it seems like the game is mechanically all ok.

The play field is worn a bit: down to wood in the center and the kick-out points; there's some lines (planking?) on the right side of the play field, key lines and inserts are worn.

I'd like to do a light fix to make it presentable, specially the parts worn to the wood. What'd be the easiest approach?

Available to me are some small tubes of acrylic paints available, a small spray paint compressor setup too.

Thanks!

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fredsmythson Thanks for the link and suggestions. I decided to try to airbrush the area that was worn down to the wood. I prepped it with melamine foam (magic eraser) and alcohol. Used frisket to mask off a smaller area. Mixing the color did not go well, that is definitely an art I'll have to tune - I'll try again with another coat.

I did run into a complication, the frisket pulled up the old clear coat, so now my beach ball players look like they're sunburn peeling (beach joke, haha). Unfortunately peeled up some other areas too.

Is there some clever way to pull up the clear in a controlled manner, or is this a slog of peeling part by part and laying down a new clear?

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I'm trying this as an approach, don't know if it'll work but we will see. For the peeling clear, I'm going through and scoring the black lines as the edge with a blade to peel the clear coat to. This seems to at least give me consistency on the colors for when I spray new clear.

In the mean time, I'm trying to cover up the spots that are worn to the wood. Frisket seems to work great. First sanded the edges of the cracked parts to smooth it, then put on a couple coats of white, then the orange on top. Not perfect, but better than it was.

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Lol talk about terrible attention to detail on my part... I didn't even notice! This explains why the rubbers were not right! The manual diagram shows different rubbers for it.

I did clean the play field with alcohol and magic eraser, nothing peeled then. It was when I lifted the frisket did it pull that peel up. I've since been scraping that off.

This is the first time I'm trying this so its a good educational experience, I figure it was pretty trashed to the wood and I can't botch it too badly. Not sure how to mix up the off-white sections that got worn out by the kickouts, maybe a hint of brown & black?

Short update of the work we did over the weekend (the kids were excited to help out!) - laid down a spray of green for the appropriate sections via air brush. Did some touchup on other areas that were down to the wood. The black bled under the masking in a few places, so I have a lot of not-so-crisp lines - not sure how to fix that. I skipped the whole trying to level the inserts stage, and honestly I probably should have tried that harder.

Plan to use water-slide decals to print the missing words for the center target "SPOTS SELECTED NUMBER" and some other details (the yellow-orange S that's missing from the kickout hole).

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Hey folks, I finally wrapped this up. I had touched up some remaining areas as best as I could match, the createx paints are very good for mixing; for example, the white with a drop of flourescent orange made a perfect match for the cream white areas that had been worn to the wood.

I sanded lightly with melamine foam (aka magic eraser); I then did a few coats of clear to lock it all down; this made a huge difference. You can definitely tell where things were patched up on close inspection, like the areas that were worn down to the wood.

Waxed, reassembled, and calling it playable.

I definitely have more appreciation for folks that strip everything down to restore pins. If I were to do this again (properly) I'd probably take ALL the parts off the playfield, patch and sand the wood, find a way to even out the inserts, use a thicker clear to flatten things out more.

Thanks!

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