THE RESTORATION BEGINS: March 07.
First I decided to tackle the playfield, as this was going to be the most difficult and time consuming. Most collectors would’ve launched this one to the rubbish tip and found a replacement, but I’m not most collectors! I just saw a challenge! As there was such severe wear and ball swirl marks, I decided to try something different for some of the artwork… by scanning the badly affected areas with a flatbed scanner, touching up the images in photostudio and printing them onto clear adhesive film. Thus making adhesive decals or overlays! These would be placed over the properly prepared worn areas as needed. The finished results would then be covered with Mylar, as have done with all my playfield restores that I’ve undertaken. At this stage I hadn’t heard of anyone repairing PF damage using decals, sites like AP didn’t exist at that time and I wasn’t aware of any other web forums with any info on this sort of thing so it was all an experiment to me.
The 1st pic here shows me recreating the missing black key lines on the playfield that were worn away. This was necessary so that I’d have something to scan in order to reproduce the artwork, and scanning the bonus ladder section that I was going to try making decals for. It was necessary to scan and print the overlay in two sections obviously because it was larger than A4 size. It had to be carefully lined up before sticking down onto the playfield. I knew I’d probably only get ONE chance to get it right or I’d have to start all over again!
Last pic, the finished bonus ladder section decal(s) done in two sections, using A4 size inkjet clear adhesive decal paper.
