Apart from the handy-man brown paint, the playfield is in an extremely good condition. There appears to be factory mylar with a few small bubbles/cracks around few inserts. Will address Playfield and electrics later.
First step was to try and remove that horrible brown paint and hopefully the original art was underneath. Luckily, my local paint shop still stocked Citrus Paint stripper. This stuff is fantastic. Once I tested on the back of the main cabinet, I applied and left for 20 mins. With a piece of thin plastic, the brown paint just rolled off on each 4inch swipe.
Once down to the original paint, I now understand why someone painted over. Huge amount of damage (can’t see clearly in picture), large gouges and worn off/faded colours. (People might now be cursing me about keeping it original, but this cabinet was very, bad) Once I got down to the complete side art, I thought, there is no way I’m going to reproduce this amount of curves/detail, with masking tape (those fish scales detail, will cause pain).
As I now know there was only x375 of these made, a stencil kit was not an option.
Can I now point out, I did not know anything about the aussiepinball site and the many helpful resources/information about making stencil’s. I wish I had posted beforehand and maybe ‘Retropin’ could have supplied a stencil kit.
I went with the old fashioned method. Tracing paper