I have posted this stuff on the web before but I have had quite a few emails about how I repaired my WH20 mountains so I thought I would put the info here as well.
Basically my WH20 mountains all had issues, they were either cracked, had holes in them or were missing the screw tabs ......and in one case the mountain was missing altogether.
Heres a couple of shots of the Boulder Garden area as I recieved my WH20..... note the yellow bumper cap where a mountain should be , as well as the broken right mountain ( broken tab ) with a split in it also.
As you can see I was missing the Left Mountain from this area, it is the one that has the Boulder Garden sign attached to it. So I posted an ad at Mr Pinball Classifieds and a guy in the USA sent me his BG mountain for free, it was broken and had no BG sign but I thought it was better than having nothing there.
When it arrived it had broken screw tabs and a few small holes , unfortunatley I didnt take a shot of it as I recieved it.
I went to my local Hobby store and purchsed some materials to fix them. I bought 1mm thick 'V-Grooved' plastic styrene sheeting for $11.00 and some hobby paints.
The repair of the broken or missing screw tabs was pretty easy, I simply placed the mountain on the plastic sheet and then cut a section of the plastic styrene to the shape of the mountain edge, cut it off the sheet and used araldite to glue it into place ......see below
Then all I had to do was to level up the top of those sections so that after painting, they would blend in with the original mountain. For this I used Selleys(?) Plastibond, its simple to work with and sets rock solid........
I did all the mountain repairs in this manner. At this point I smoothed those area's ( the plastibond ) as best as I could and proceeded to the painting stage..... I didnt do the painting in any particular order, what I did was to put the darker of the 2 browns down first and then while it was still wet I added the lighter brown to it in little streaks so it went patchy and let it dry ( used a pinhead hobby paintbrush for this as well ) , then I lightly sprayed the Orange over the sections I had repaired
So now I had the screw tabs done , I was actually going to leave the BG sign off the mountain but I thought I would have a crack at making one anyway. I had another Wh20 owner take a photo of his ( faded ) BG sign and email it to me .......I got this....
I simply opened that in Photoshop and re-coloured it and matched the blue to the blues on my WH20 other little signs that are located around the playfield - heres how it looked after that.....
Then I printed that image on some 'Celcast' Transparent Sign sheets that I bought retail ages ago and I cut a sign out of 2mm perspex, I then used a spray glue that dreis clear and glued this new BG image to the rear of the sign I had made ( so I sprayed the glue directly onto the front face of the BG sign that I had printed ) once the glue dried you cannot tell it is done like that.
I dont own a rivet gun so I got ( already had ) a tiny nut and bolt and used that to mount it to the mountain and I used a little spring washer behind it so that it shouldnt shake loose.....
And here is my Boulder Garden these days - all finished and ( I think ) looking pretty good considering it cost me about $25.00 and a few hours labour .... note that one other thing I did was to put little rubber washers under the screws that I screwed the mountains back down with ( and then painted them all brown to ) I did this as a further way of hopefully absorbing a bit more bang from th eball so that these mountains may not break so easily next time - I have no idea if it helps but I thought it cant hurt.
I know another pinhead recently used this same method to succesfully repair the mountain on his Cactus Canyon.
If anyone wants help with this procedure or larger images of these areas just email me.
I also used this method to repair a large hole of about an inch in diameter to the mountain on the left side of WH20 that sites under the Insanity Falls ramp - the good thing about the plastic styrene is that you can heat it and mould it to the shape you need to patch a hole , then bog over it with plasticbond and paint it.
Below is what it started like....I am sure you will see the end result in some other WH20 threads I will be putting up soon...
