Fireball

All posts tagged Fireball

The end is in sight for the installation of my new Fireball Decals. The headbox was completed a few weeks ago. The right side was completed last week and now this week, it’s time to knock the left side over. This includes a new side rail to finish the cabinet off nicely. The left side decal was in a similar condition to the right with the colours badly faded. The condition of the cabinet was better though and less damage to patch up.

Fireball Pinball
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Here I was thinking I would not get to look at finishing the Fireball Classic decals until the new year. Railways pulled off an amazing Christmas Miracle and managed to get a new custom set of side rails delivered just before Xmas day. No reason to delay, I wanted to get the side art completed ASAP. This update will cover the right side and the final update (part 4) will cover the progress on the left side. The new side rails fit perfectly and the button could now sit correctly.

Fireball Pinball
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With the headbox decals complete, it was time to move onto the cabinet body decals. This was supposed to be a 2 part update (first for the headbox and the second for the cabinet). Sadly, I’ve run into a problem which is going to set me back about 4 weeks. Even with all my planning, I can’t predict everything. But that’s OK, I’ll go as far as I can and just do a short update for now.

The side art on the cabinet is faded, just like the headbox. The rails are also damaged – the worst being the right side rail (as you can see about 1/3 of the way up the rail).

Fireball
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It’s been a long time since I did any work on my Fireball Classic. I worked with a friend and had the artwork recreated over 6 months ago. It was only recently delivered in physical form. Finally. But it looks good. Really good. With my Xmas holidays about to start shortly, I figured it was time to once again give some attention to my Fireball Classic restore project and complete it. The main thing left is the side art, although there are a few other ends I want to tidy up also before I’m happy to say “I’m done”. In this update, i’ll be adding new side art to the head box. As you would have seen in previous updates, I had the side art reproduced (since it’s not actually available anywhere). A lot of attention was given to the detail of the curves and the stars, so it’s pretty accurate. The side art on my machine is very much faded and is also torn in several places. The t-moulding is also cracked and will need to be replaced.

Fireball
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The Fireball Classic has some pretty neat side art. The one down side to it is it fades. Every Fireball machine I’ve see has suffered the same fate (to varying degrees). On mine, the yellow fire is white and the orange fire is yellow. The red and blue have held up better, but have certainly seen better days. The side art is actually printed on decals, which is the primary reason for the colour fade.

There are two options available to me – replace the decals or use stencils and paint. I explored the painting option first but backed away from that option. There are stencils available for the original Fireball machine, but none for the Classic. I could make my own, but it would be quite time consuming to get it right and I don’t believe it would provide an accurate high quality finish like the original.

That left decals. I did some searching but could not locate any for sale. Luckily I had a contact who is an artist and was up for reproducing the fireball decals. With his help, the head box and cabinet body decals have been reproduced. We went through a few revisions as some issues were ironed out, but it’s come up looking pretty good.

Fireball classic side art decals
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