tisdag 27 september 2011

Gameplan Old Coney Island

The first picture shows the state of the playfield when I first got it. The game was in quite bad shape, allmost ready for the scrap heap. Except from the worn playfield the CPU was badly dammaged by battery acid and the cabinet is also in bad shape. But I have read a lot of renovation stories at the internet and I wanted to see what I could do with this machine. It turned out to be much more work than I first thought...

 

The first thing I did was fixing the CPU, without a working CPU there are no idea to spend money and time fixing the rest of the machine. I'll get back to the CPU repair later.
I removed all parts from both sides off the playfield before cleaning, it was very dirty also at the underside. I first repainted the large blob by the kick out hole. At the picture you can see that I didn't got a perfect colour match, but it looks much better IRL. Maybe the photo flash made it look more off than it is. Also, I didn't manage to repaint the missing stars in the new blue area, I tried both using a template and also made a rubber stamp, but It just didn't look OK so I decided to leave them out. The missing stars might make the new painted area to stand out a bit extra. There was also a lot of other areas of the playfield that needed attention. Among them, the girl is completely repainted. There was a lot of ball whirls in the original coating and this made the girl to look hairy. And since I don't like girls with a hairy chest I decided to repaint her. After spending a couple of months working with the paint (and some other projects) I started with the clear coating. I used spraycans for this, five of them, Each can lasted for four layers. 24 hours curing between each layer and a week between each can. Before starting a new can I carefully sanded the cured layer to get it smooth. This procedure took over two months. What I have learnt by this is that clear coating by spraycans does not fill up as well as professionaly applyed clear coating. Even though that I now has 20 layers of clear I can still feel the differences in thicknes between my new paint and the original. I think that next time I will get professional help for the clear coating, 5 cans of spray is quite expensive and I don't think it will be much more expensive to have it done by an expert. Another thing I'm not happy with is the 25 000 text in the blue rhomb. This is painted by hand, and I didn't manage the text When lit. This should instead have been printed at a piece of clear acrylic and glued on, with a decent thicknes of the clearcoating it should have been completely covered.