3d Pinball Playfield Restoration
By Alan Lewis
The
playfield had 6 major wear through channels coming out of all the kick out
holes plus a lot of white ball divots all over.
The pop bumper areas were well worn and had damage. One insert was missing and four inserts were
completely disintegrated but still hanging in there. All the plastics were damaged.
The first order of business was to
scan the playfield.
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The
center inserts were repaired with waterslide decals. After scanning and repairing the image a
decal was made and cut in half for easier handling. The insert holes were punched in before
applying the decal. This was a VERY
fragile decal and was difficult to get it to lie down. |
The area
above the inserts was also repaired using a decal. This is the finished job for both. |
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More wear
through damage. Fill in this damage and
sand flat. The best thing to use for
filling in is stick epoxy. It can be
wet troweled very flat and smooth when applied. |
A decal
was made and trimmed to fit just the damaged area. I decided to err on the side of more
original graphics showing rather than repair an entire area for a small area
of damage. This is a choice that you
must make. |
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The
result is quite good. You can see the
areas that join but when the game is finished and you are playing you will
not notice it at all. The best part is
I saved most of the original graphic. |
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The pop
bumper areas had to be filled in and leveled.
Again use stick epoxy for this. |
A decal
was made that included the entire pop bumper area, including the bare wood
grain. I used the clone tool in
Photoshop to reproduce the original wood grain so it looked natural. |
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This is
the finished decal repair |
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Wear
through at the four upper kick out holes. |
Four
separate repair decals were made in order to save the original graphics as
much as possible. Again this is a
choice you must make. One large decal would
look better but cover up a lot of good original graphics. |
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The
shooter gauge was scanned and a clear repair decal was made. The gauge was grit blasted, painted with
hammered silver paint and the repair decal applied. |
Copyright 2010 by Alan Lewis