I needed to order some parts from the Pinball Resource before I could begin to re-assemble the top PF; so I decided to spend some time on the shooter of the machine. Lets start with original pics of the shooter trim:
Ick! That won't do.
I could have bought a new shooter trim plate; but I wanted to experiment a little. So first I began by sandblasting the plate of it's rust. Then I polished it to a shine using 40, 80, 100, 280, 500, 800, 1000, 1500 grit sandpaper. Following up with rubbing and polishing compound.
There were still some minor nicks and valleys in the trim; so I decided to try some experiments and settled on the following.
First, I scanned in the Manual logo and converted it to vector in Corel Draw. Then put some fiberglass tape on the plate where I laser vector cut the black background into the fiberglass tape using 100% power and 8% speed:
Then using my exacto knife; I carefully removed the letters from the tape:
Out came the powder coating gun and oven:
Remove the fiber tape:
Overlay some Transfer Tape and Laser etch the foreground lettering:
The carefully remove the detail areas with a set smt tweezers:
Sandblast with iron oxide:
Examine our work:
And then coat with some final clear powdercoat to protect the metal from future rust and grimmy hands:
TerDah!
