Stern Dracula restore; PART 2

[Mr Pinbologist]

Here’s a bit of an update on my Dracula backglass restore. I’ve been slack with it lately, just doing little bits and pieces here and there on the glass.. haven’t been real motivated to do anything much to it until a couple of days ago.

I’ve been working on some of the light up lettering that has damage/ flaking of the paint on them.. namely the GAME OVER, and the HIGH GAME TO DATE sections.

As can be seen in the 1st and 2nd pic the GAME OVER has some paint missing in a couple of letters. First thing I did was to carefully airbrush in the missing paint, using the same acrylic “centre red” colour I used for the name lettering. With a light behind the glass to help with matching of the translucency, I air brushed in the red being careful not to get too much paint on the surrounding paint.. VERY tricky to do, and it took me a few goes to get it looking “decent” as I like to say about doing this type of thing. Once I was happy with the paint thickness and translucency I then sprayed on some acrylic white primer to help even out the light shining through it, and to brighten the paint a bit.

Next thing I did was to spray on some silver to block out the light where it wasn’t wanted. I used sheets of paper as stencils to mask off the top and bottom of the letters (masked top first and sprayed, then the bottom after the top had dried).

Then I used a combination of stencil and hand painting to repair the silver mask on the V, E and R on the word OVER. 3rd pic below shows the work done. The vertical line is the gap between the E and R, which I sprayed in, the rest was done by hand with a brush. I’ll spray some more silver around the rest of this later on to tidy it up a bit.

Last pic shows end result, backlit. Not perfect I know, but MUCH better than how it originally looked!!

[Mr Pinbologist]

Now for the HIGH GAME TO DATE section.

Look at the first pic, showing the backside of the glass lit from the front.. showing just how bad this area was!! And to make matters worse, it too was sprayed with red paint just like the rest of the art!!! I still can’t believe the idiotic things some people do!!! 

At one point I almost considered just painting this a solid colour and pulling the globes out from behind and leaving it at that. But when I was looking thru my shelf of spraypaints, I noticed a can of acrylic paint in a colour called blaze blue. I sprayed a bit onto the front of the glass, and would you believe it… it was a pretty good match straight outta the can!!
A bold  plan immediately started to form in my mind, scan the lettering from the back, clean off the glass in this area, spray on some blaze blue and create a decal to replace the lettering!!

First thing I did was to scan the back of the glass in this area. 2nd pic shows how I did it, placing a light underneath so the scanner would pick up the area properly. I removed the scanner lid and placed it onto the backglass. I always scan everything at 300dpi when doing this kind of thing. Once I had it scanned into my PC, I cleaned up the image in photostudio, making the background black, and the letters clear (white, prints clear onto the clear adhesive label I use). 3rd pic shows a test print done onto normal A4 paper. Notice I’m recreating a “lightning bolt” in the backglass artwork here too.

[Mr Pinbologist]

Next comes scary bit.. scraping and cleaning off the backside of the glass!!! First I cut a line in original paint with a hot scalpel blade, so as not to chip the surrounding art, where I wanted to paint up to. Then I scraped off all the old paint up to the cut lines, and cleaned the glass with Windex. 1st pic shows the top part cleaned up.. I hadn’t yet cleaned the ‘lightning bolt’ area (light blue) below when this pic was taken.

Next I covered the surrounding areas and gave the glass a few coats of the acrylic blue. (2nd and 3rd pic). I found it necessary to do several coats to get the paint to cover and not be “see through”. As a result, this will NOT get the flat white backing as it was not necessary, and would’ve dulled the lamps too much, (it blocks a fair bit of light already).

[Mr Pinbologist]

After I’d applied the blue paint to my satisfaction and allowed it to dry (overnight), I applied the lettering decal I’d made the night before (one I prepared earlier…  ), smoothing it on carefully trying not to get any bubbles in it. I knew id only get ONE go at applying this.. if I got it wrong id be starting all over again!! Luckily I got the decal on first go (If it had to come back off, all of the paint would’ve come up with it!!)

Pics below show the end result. I didn’t get a pic of the decal without the silver backing paint unfortunately.. (too impatient..lol). 2nd pic is with the desk lamp backlighting the glass. Im pretty happy with how this turned out.

[ddstoys]

Thats a bloody awesome job ive just wrapped a few backglasses to send to you for repair.

[illawarra_steelers]

Oh Mitch you are a VERY BRAVE MAN!

The results (as always) are top shelf and now you have me thinking about my Thoro-Bred backglass as it has the same issues.

Time to go for a walk on the beach with my dogs and get my head around this 

[Strangeways]

Very brave indeed Mitch !

Great results given the risk you took.

 

[Mr Pinbologist]

Thanks guys. I figured i had nothing to lose really by trying this.. especially seeing as the blue was a pretty good match (not perfect i know) but good enough to get away with.

Anything is better than how it looked before!!!

[Mr Pinbologist]

Ok… today I’ve spent some time working on some of the backlit artwork areas, in particular the area shown in the 1st pic. Unfortunately I didn’t get a “before” pic to show the damage to the bits im repairing in this post, not from the front at least. But you can see in some of the behind pics what im attempting to repair.

First thing I had to do was to replace the missing parts of the black key lines, I used a sharpie pen in some spots and black paint in others. The 1st and 2nd pic show the parts I used the black paint on. Some of this has already been repaired and had some flat white sprayed on as can be seen, this was areas of red and white that had fine cracks that I touched up by hand that came up ok.

The last two pics show the damaged ink in the womens legs and arms, and an attempt to touch up by hand. This looked bad I thought, so I decided to clean out all of the skin coloured ink on the legs and airbrush these areas instead. Details in the next post…

[illawarra_steelers]

Mitch,

Sorry if I missed this in your posts - but what methid did you use to match the blue so well?

[Mr Pinbologist]

First thing I had to do before removing the skin coloured ink was to take some pics so I could recreate the black detail “dots” in the girls arms and legs. Next I scraped out all of the old ink, taking care not to damage the surrounding black lines etc, (I cut into the ink close to these keylines with a scalpel blade that I heated with a cigarette lighter). I then very carefully cleaned the glass with Windex, sprayed onto a rag or cotton bud first and NOT the glass.

1st pic shows on of the paper stencils cut out and positioned in the backglass (the glass had not yet been cleaned when I took this pic). Next I mixed up some paint in the correct colour.. after some experimentation I found that using the white primer and some Centre Red mixed together in the right amounts gave a near perfect match for the skin colours!!

In the 2nd pic the girls arm and leg have been airbrushed. Last pic shows the front of the glass after the skin colours areas have been done as needed. As stated I ended up doing all of the girls arms, the girl in the fronts leg and some very fine touchup work on their faces as needed.

[Mr Pinbologist]

Mitch,

Sorry if I missed this in your posts - but what methid did you use to match the blue so well?

Umm... pot luck..  seriously though that colour was how it was straight outta the can!!

[Mr Pinbologist]

 The guys trousers were very patchy looking so rather that try to touch up and match to the original colour which was virtually impossible, I again removed all of the ink and black detail dots, recreated these from a pic taken earlier and repainted the area in a solid blue that I had at hand. The colour didn’t match the original hue used, but I thought it’d look a LOT better than it did before!!! And because its only a small area im not overly worried about it.
 
After that I gave the repaired areas a light coat of flat white acrylic primer. Note that I’d been doing this for each individual section as I repaired it.. looks a bit patchy from the back where each section joins but I can fix this later.

Last of all some pics of the repaired area.. with flash on, no flash and with the garage lights off.

[Strangeways]

Honestly mate - I can't see the touched up areas in the last pictures - You did a GREAT job !

[ajlaird]

Very impressive - unless you told us I wouldn't know any better.