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!