Mitch's next project.. Zaccaria Universe

[johnwartjr]

Now there ya go, that's more like it!

Very nice!

[Mr Pinbologist]

Another progress update;

Been busy the last few days after work repainting sections of the red and purple on the backglass, scraping out the old flaking paint, cleaning the glass with Windex, masking off the surrounding areas from overspray with paper stencils to spray in the new colour. Most of these areas are ones I thought I wouldn’t bother doing, but I decided I couldn’t leave them how they were!

Anyway some pics of the work being done…

[Mr Pinbologist]

More pics.. and a shot of the front of the glass after this work.

Sorry .. forgot to resize the second pic!

[Mr Pinbologist]

And here is one of the sections (1st pic) that had cracking in the paint that couldn’t be seen until backlit. And the next few pics are how I chose to correct the problem, I used this small area as a test section. Because this cracking couldn’t be seen from the front til backlit, and that id previously sealed the glass with triple thick, I just sprayed some dark blue on to hide the cracks, and later after this blue had dried I sprayed on some silver to completely block out the light. Because the glass was sealed with triple thick, there was no danger of the different coloured blue I used leeching through to the front of the glass. These pics are before the silver went on. Even without the silver it all but blocks out the light I had shining behind it. Simple but effective fix me thinks!!

Notice I have a few small areas of missing paint to touch up.. I’ll probably just do these with waterbased artists acrylics.

[ddstoys]

Looks great mitch are you tracing the areas then cutting them out with a scalpel?     Looks very good i have a few i might have to try your method on

[Mr Pinbologist]

And heres what I did this morning. I thought id have a go at repairing the white score reel areas. Originally was going to use white adhesive label to replace the white paint and cut out the score windows, but I decided to give SPURRs idea a try (repaint these areas). Only variation from his idea was how I chose to mask off the score windows. I scanned one of the score reel sections, cleaned the image up a bit, and copied it to make four images in photostudio and made adhesive stencils from adhesive clear inkjet label! Worked a treat as I was able to print out perfectly sized and spaced windows onto the adhesive label that could be simply be cut out with a scalpel once stuck down onto the glass.

Once the adhesive masking stencils were made I cleaned all of the old white out of the 1st and 2nd player sections to start with, and cleaned the glass with Windex. Of course.. as I was cutting the white paint close top the black with the heated scalpel blade… some of the surrounding black came off didn’t it??  Making more work for me. I then had to fix these bits before I could continue. After masking off and airbrushing down some black paint I was back in business. After carefully applying the score window maskings and cutting out the sections to be painted, I masked off the surrounding areas and sprayed on a few light coats of flat white acrylic paint. Then after a couple of minutes I removed the score window masks.. worked a treat!!! Thanks SPURR for inspiring me to give this a try!! As I said before I HAD been thinking of trying this, but it was  SPURRs tip which provided the inspiration to give it a go!!

[Mr Pinbologist]

Looks great mitch are you tracing the areas then cutting them out with a scalpel?     Looks very good i have a few i might have to try your method on

yepp just tracing the areas onto plain A4 paper, shining a light through the glass and tracing the outline of the light. then cutting out the tracing and using the paper as a stencil for spraying the paint.

[ddstoys]

Looks great mitch are you tracing the areas then cutting them out with a scalpel?     Looks very good i have a few i might have to try your method on

yepp just tracing the areas onto plain A4 paper, shining a light through the glass and tracing the outline of the light. then cutting out the tracing and using the paper as a stencil for spraying the paint.

You make it sound so simple mitch well done 

[Mr Pinbologist]

a couple more pics showin how the glass looks now. just have to do the bottom two score reel areas, and do some touchups in the blue areas

[SPURR]

Great job Mitch , how good does the score reels look now ! When back lite it will look so much better done this way.
Keep keeping us updated Mitch its great to see.

[Mr Pinbologist]

Another update;

Been busy as with the backglass, working on some of the smaller paint loss areas, mainly in the dark blue. In the 1st pic is an example of what I had to repair. Most of this was done with waterbased artists acrylic paint. After several attempts of trying to colour match the blue and just brush it onto the chipped areas in the section pictured, I decided to scrape out the whole area close to the black keylines on the yellow stars (2nd pic) and just brush in the new colour right up to the keylines.

To me, nothing looks worse than mismatching patches of colours in a large area of one colour, we’ve all seen it.. backglasses and playfields with a blob of mismatching paint in a large area of colour, with no other detail.. stands out like a third nut on a greyhound!! So a trick I occasionally use on glasses and PFs is to just repaint an entire area, right up to another different coloured area, as can  be seen in the 3rd pic. So basically in a nutshell what i mean is, i find its easy to conceal a slightly mismatched colour touchup in a highly detailed area that it is in a large area of a single colour. if those missing sections of blue paint were out in the open i would've scraped out and repainted ALL of the blue.

Yes the repainted area IS slightly darker in that pic, but it looks much better in person, trust me! And as I’ve maintained in the past, these things will NEVER look like new no matter what you do. BUT they can look 100 times better if you just put the time into making them look , as I call it “decent”.  Like I said before, im pretty pleased with how this glass is turning out, a glass that would’ve otherwise been launched.

[Mr Pinbologist]

Spraying on the silver/grey masking paint to block out the light. Once again it just automotive acrylic spraypaint. To mask off the areas I don’t want painted I make paper stencils by placing A4 printer paper onto the back of the glass with a strong light shining up from the front so I can see where to trace. Then I cut out the unwanted areas with a scalpel and place it onto the glass, and hold it in place with a few weights (sockets nuts or scraps of metal etc, im using electric screwdriver bits..lol). I then cover the rest of the glass with paper or cloth to protect the rest of the glass from overspray.. you should see the glass as I do this… a backglass covered with sheets and paper with just a small section exposed.. it looks like im doing surgery. 

Then I spray the paint on.. 2 or 3 light to medium coats, then I usually pull the stencil off straight after the last coat. Doing this type of thing, I HAVE had the paper pull up surrounding paint because of spraying on too much paint, and leaving it on too long.. not good! Hence why I remove the paper stencil quickly.

Anyway here are a few pics showing the process I used. It aint that pretty from the back I’ll admit, but the silver also helps hide most of the touchups from a casual glance at the back of the glass. but not too many people will ever see the back once its in the game hey??

[Mr Pinbologist]

And here is the end result… well not quite finished.. about 90% done. I still need to clean the front of the glass yet (not done in these pics, its covered in fingerprints and crap!). I have a couple of small touchups to do on Mr Universe’s head, but that can wait for now. I need to get a start on a few other jobs that are waiting to be done.. including the wildfyre pf that I have to do.
 
Next… cab respray will be started after new year when I have time off work… watch this space!!

[ddstoys]

Very inspiring Mitch from talk of parting this machine out because of a stuffed backglass to this in such a short time....
  You really are the man 

[Strangeways]

Outstanding, Mitch 

Certainly gives hope to a few of us that would not have attempted this level of backglass restoration.