PAINTING A PINBALL WITHOUT A PATTERN

By Alan Lewis

Re-painting a pinball cabinet is difficult enough when you still have some of the original graphics showing. But when all the graphics have been stripped off…

This LADY ROBIN HOOD pinball machine saw a common fate over the years. It was stripped and stained. Actually it looked pretty good stained and it was a good job. But that won’t work for me.

There isn’t anything else you can do except ask for help from another owner and/or get good photos of a machine to scale from. I had the help of both Sean Kavanagh for some key measurements and John Robertson for close up photos. Without this help I would have had a much more difficult time.

The following is nothing new for anyone who has repainted a cabinet before. It is just a record of what I did on this one.

	The clear finish was stripped off with a paint stripper. Sanding took off the stain. A white primer was applied as a base coat.
	This is the stencil package I made up from posterboard. All were used once but I kept using the one stencil ten times. It actually worked better after a few uses.
	I don’t apply a temporary adhesive to the entire stencil but rather I cut small windows in the stencil and use low tack painters masking tape. It is easier to re-use the stencil this way and you can get softer edges when painting. This photo shows the backside of the stencils, the blue is the tape showing through the windows.
	Using the backbox as an example the base black coat is applied. Then a yellow spatter dot pattern is applied using a welders wire brush dipped into very thin paint and wacked with a 2X4 to propel the paint dots onto the cabinet.
	Then the stencil is put on and the blue color is painted over the spattered paint.
	The finished backbox

PAINT USED:

· WHITE PRIMER

· Rust-oleum Painters Touch SPA BLUE

· Rust-oleum Painters Touch GLOSS BLACK

· Rust-oleum Painters Touch APPLE RED

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