Alpha Bravo Pinball

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!

After letting the blue paint dry for a week, today I proceeded to the next step and painted the red color. The graphics are painted using vinyl stencils which have an adhesive backing – be warned this can easily lift paint that’s not fully cured! Also note that the stencils for the cabinet are quite large and would be difficult for one person to handle – I summoned the help of a fellow pinhead to put them on. Everything that’s blue paint and not covered by the yellow stencil got masked off, and I was ready to start painting.

Starting out with a very light coat, I then proceeded to slightly thicker coats…

At first it seems like the red paint will never cover the blue, but with patience and enough coats, it will. Note that I didn’t use primer because I wanted to be sure the edges were clean and without visible primer – let’s hope I don’t have any adhesion problems…

After a bunch more coats, the vinyl mask is ready to be peeled! I did this with the paint still slightly wet, otherwise it would be easy to pull off paint with the mask.

Some tips on pulling the masking material:

• Pull in the same direction as edges as much as possible, not perpendicular. This results in cleaner edges.
• The vinyl mask is quite large – pulling it in one piece with the paint still wet is asking for trouble, especially around the intricate parts. It’s much easier to start peeling and let it tear / cut into smaller segments as you go.

Here’s the cabinet after pulling all the vinyl! Pretty good. Some slight bleeding under the mask here and there, and not all the edges are perfectly clean, but decent enough. Obviously there’s still half the graphics missing (the white color) so for now you’ll have to use your imagination to picture what it will look like when complete 🙂

Here’s the part I’m dissatisfied with the most though, the backbox.

Notice how the left edge is quite jagged on one side. Unfortunately the paint pulled away at me with the edge of the mask. Since those are straight lines though, it shouldn’t be too hard to patch up using masking tape and some more red paint.

My other beef with how this turned out is that the stencil was obviously not done properly – the top line should be parallel to the edge of the backbox above, but the angle is wrong and there’s a much bigger gap on the right side than on the left. Update: It looks like it may not be the stencil that’s off, but rather my backbox itself! It seems as though other Space Shuttles out there have a backbox that matches the stencil! Very strange indeed…