After the Twisted Pins drama, it’s good to be bringing the cabinet work on Pinbot to completion. I’m tempted to do a write up comparison between the two different sets of stencils to highlight the pros and cons. But i’ll save that for another day. For now, it’s time to finish off the cabinet and get the machine back together. At the end of the previous post, I had sanded off the paint from the Twisted Pins stencils and repainted the black. The yellow layer was done first. This stencil layer has two registration marks which it leaves on the cabinet when pealed off. This is an incredibly easy system to use and get right. I like that Pinball Pimp has included these as it makes lining up the second layer easy. The stencils also have the correct bleed and traps, which means the final result will look accurate. Here the second stencil has been lined up and is ready for the red paint.
paint
All posts tagged paint
It’s time to finally post another update on my Pinbot restoration. Over 2 months since my last post, and it feels like much longer. I was well underway with the cabinet restore when I encountered an issue with the stencil kit purchased from Twisted Pins. I did a detailed write up of the experience – which you can read about here: http://www.enteryourinitials.com/2015/05/07/twisted-pins-customer-service-is-horrible/. As a brief summary – avoid buying from them if you can – Travis is not worth dealing with and the stencils are not good quality. Look to Pinball Pimp and Flipper Rescue for their stencils first as the quality is much higher and the guys running those businesses are much better to deal with (especially if there is an issue). I had originally planned to make the cabinet restore a single post. But due to the issues encountered and the time it’s taking, I’ve decided to cover the cabinet restoration across a couple of posts. So time to dive in and chart the progress so far.
The starting point. The left side of the cabinet is the hardest hit in terms of damage. There are a few nice chunks taken out and plenty of scratches and scrapes of varying degrees. For many people, this state is more than reasonable. If it was another machine, I’d probably leave it. But this is Pinbot and a machine I love – so I’m keen to go the extra yards and make it beautiful again. The cabinet is still very solid, which is an excellent starting point. After some patching and repainting, it’s going to look awesome (I hope).
The coin door on my Pinbot machine is in need of some attention. It’s not the worst I’ve seen (actually, far from it), but it could certainly do with some love. The photo makes it look a bit better than it really is. Up close, there are far more chips and scratches along the edges of both the coin accept and coin return face plates. On the up side, the door itself is solid and should do up nicely.
The middle and right coin accept slots have been covered up with tape (there are no coin mechs hooked up to either of these).
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.
My first go at play field touch up.
Just below the base of the ramp at the top of the play field, a spot had worn away completely (across orange, yellow and some blue). There was also some marking along the orange flame a little further down which required some attention.
