Just a quick update today. It’s time to start installing hardware on the new playfield! I started with the T-nuts (aka tee nuts). I hammered in, so it seems logical to do this first with the playfield still blank. I could also use a machine screw from the top side to install them, but hammering them in from the bottom was much quicker.
It was too cold and rainy to do spray painting today, so I switched back to my other parallel task, the playfield swap.
My goal with my Space Shuttle pinball game is for it to look as new as possible when it’s done. To do this, I’m throwing as many new parts at it as possible – all new plastics, playfield, ramp, etc. The new reproduction ramps that are being made are of much thicker plastic – this has the benefit of making for a much tougher ramp that is less likely to crack over time. The downside is that the ramp cannot be installed cleanly into a playfield, as the extra thickness of material causes a clearance problem. The problem and one solution is described pretty clearly in this Pinside thread.
I decided to take the plunge and, while it sounds scary, route out my brand new expensive reproduction Space Shuttle playfield! Here it is with some painters tape to protect the clearcoat and mark out the material that needs to be removed:
Next, I went to a friend’s house who was kind enough to not only let me use his wood router, but also teach me how to use it and practice on a scrap piece. Let the chips fly!
Here’s the result. I was easily able to stay within a 1/16″ of my taped edge going freehand, which is plenty enough precision for this.
Now the ramp should install cleanly. I won’t know for sure until all the other parts are installed of course, but it looks good so far.
Today I made some more progress one the Space Shuttle pinball cabinet re-painting. It was exciting to proceed to the third and final color, white!
I started with the backbox. The stencils I bought came as one big piece, but alignment over the red color is critical and I figured it would be way too difficult to align it all at once, so I broke the problem down by cutting the white stencil into smaller pieces. The stencils are super sticky, and once they’re on… they’re on. Cutting it into smaller pieces made it more labor intensive to mask everything off – the lines between the pieces needed thin tape strips to be sure no white paint bled between them – but it was definitely way easier to get the alignment right and I’m glad I used this approach.
What you can’t see in the picture above is that the stars below the feet of the astronaut are indeed a separate piece, but no tape was needed at the seam due to the pieces overlapping. I also had to use some painter’s tape to form the line on the right side, since the stencil was designed for smaller backboxes.
Here it is with the white paint applied and the masking pulled! Really happy with how the Williams logo and stars came out, and the now-two-color astronaut looks pretty good too. There’s some very small appearances of blue on the white/red edges that shouldn’t be there, but this should be fairly straightforward to patch up later.
I used the same approach on the opposite side of the backbox, slicing up the stencil in the same exact pattern – definitely took less time the second time around 🙂
Finally, I had just enough time left in the afternoon to do the front of the cabinet. Again, I cut the stencil into smaller parts.
And here it is after the white paint:
It’s not easy to get the white stencil aligned to the red one – part of the problem is how opaque the stencil is, so it’s hard to see the red underneath. I got most of the pieces very well aligned here, except for the one at the top left. Notice that the vertical white lines on the left get very very close to the edge of the red ones. It doesn’t look great, so I erased them down to about the middle of the vertical section and will re-paint them next time alongside the rest of the cabinet!
With the help of the Pinside Space Shuttle thread, it looks like the mystery of the backbox not matching the stencil is solved – Williams produced games with two different styles of backboxes! The stencil I bought to repaint the cabinet was made for the “narrow” style backbox, but I have the wider-at-the-bottom backbox.
Right after I published the previous blog post, I got mad that the red line didn’t frame the backbox correctly. It looked really bad, so I went to the garage to “erase” the offending line using mineral spirits:
A few weeks later, the red paint is now fully cured and it’s time to do some repairs. I took the opportunity to not just add in the missing line, but also re-paint some jagged edges here and there.
All masked and ready to paint! It went much quicker this time. There was obviously a much smaller area to paint, but I also didn’t wait nearly as long for the paint to dry between coats and I started peeling the masking as soon as I could with the paint still wet. I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t pull up paint and get jagged edges like last time. It worked out pretty well!
Pulling the mask while the paint is still wet also helps avoid creating a hard edge at the mask line.
Pretty clean, especially compared to the first time around! The best part, of course, is that the line that frames the backbox is now at the correct angle and parallel to the front edge. Here’s a before and after photo:
This will cure a week or two, and then the white paint will go on!
Alpha Bravo Pinball 