Ok.. I’ve been a bit slack during the last week, having started work again for the year hasn’t helped!
Have just been doing little bits and pieces here and there in between work etc. The previous week I had off work, I pretty much spent the whole time working on this PF. I reckon I’ve easily put about 70 hours into it so far.
I’m mostly done with the touchups, just the missing lettering to be redone before the mylar goes on.
The first couple of pics show the lamp inserts below the top drop targets that I had to remove (they were loose anyway) and flatten and reglue in. I ended up drawing the black circles around these using sharpie pens and a math-o-mat, rather than masking and painting, and they came up looking pretty decent I think. The light parts in the black ink (the joins between the insert and the pf) cant be seen in real life.. the camera flash just shows them up more that you really see.
Some of the minor touchups I did with waterbased acrylic paints.. mainly the black areas near the outhole/outlane areas that had some pinhole wear and a few ball swirl marks that came up pretty good using the old “paint & smear” technique, the rest with normal auto acrylic spray paint, only brushed on rather that sprayed… again mostly very small pinhole wear spots around the playfield.
For the outhole black areas I used a cotton bud, lightly moistened in the waterbased acrylic artists paint and worked the paint into the ball swirl marks in this area, then wiped off any excess paint that got onto the other colours. This worked really well for me.
I’m pretty happy with the outcome so far. And yes there have been a couple of stuffups along the way! Mostly slip ups with the paintbrush or sharpie pens due to my hand not being steady enough, thus getting paint/ink where it wasn’t supposed to go.
Nothing that couldn’t be fixed though, just made it take a bit longer to get done that’s all.
You have to be REAL careful with this if using sharpie pens doing this kind of work. If you slip up with these, it can be difficult, if not impossible to remove the ink (I used Prepsol on a cotton bud on a coupe of spots successfully), and if you have to retouch a painted area where you slipped, the ink can bleed back thru the paint you’re putting on, but with patience these stuffups can be fixed… put the paint on in a few light coats, let the paint dry between coats. I ended up using a sharpie pen with a REAL fine point to get the outline on certain parts of the PF, then carefully worked the ink up to that line with a thicker tipped pen.. (you can see an example of this in the first pic of the inserts).
