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I really liked the Darling and Jubilee tables that BorgDog released a while ago and I’ve been looking for another table to restore after finishing Tropic Fun. I can only keep one table so Darling will be going up for sale once I get it restored.
The table is from Craigs List and it is in pretty sorry shape. I spent a couple of days repairing it to the point that I was sure that I could get it fully functional before I started on restoring the cab. The paint is in pretty bad shape.
  
So I put a sheet of vapor barrier over the side art and traced it out. I then set the plastic on top of some poster board made an Orange Paint stencil and then transferred those outlines to a second sheet and made a blue stencil.
When I did Tropic Fun I preserved the original paint and did touch up work which was slow and a PIA so this time I sanded down to bare wood, filled defects and painted the cab white.
I then mixed an orange Createx Paint and airbrushed the orange stencil pattern. It was nice to see that I got a little overspray around the stencil just like the original.
I then mixed some blue and did the blue stencil.
Here is the completed cab with the unfinished head in the background. I’ll stipple in the white later by using some Createx grey and a pointed dowel like I did on Tropic Fun and then cover with a clear coat to protect the paint.
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Another killer project! Looking great so far
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cool man, looks awesome!
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oh and when you are done, you can make the VP table play like it’s supposed to , i’ve only ever run into one of these in the wild and it was in horrible working orderÂ
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This machine has no backglass so I made a clean one in Photoshop that I’ll send off to be printed. Do you want the artwork to slip into your B2S once it is done? Also I’m trying to find a schematic for the machine but there are none online, does anyone have one? I did my repairs using a Jubilee manual which shows the switch stacks. The machine will not score 300 points when the lit top rollover is triggered (but will advance the bonus 3 places) so something is still screwed up somewhere…
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sure, more artwork is always good :)Â a playfield scan would be even betterÂ
 and definitely feel free to mod/correct anything in the vp table that you think needs it.I don’t have any schematics for it either, and only the jubilee manual you probably have.
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The head got sanded to bare plywood, painted white and then stenciled like the cab. The legs of the machine were also wire brushed to remove rust, primed and painted black with Rustoleum Hammer paint.
Since I don’t have a spray attachment for making the background dot pattern (which would have been done before stenciling) I’ll move on to hand applying the dots with a bamboo skewer like I did on Tropic Fun. It looks great but takes time and sounds like someone released a woodpecker in the workshop (tap, tap, tap, tap, tap…)
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Amazing how well the stencil looks from tracing the old pattern. Well done i would say!
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Do you take any precautions for lead paint before sanding a cabinet?
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Thanks it is coming along really well and MUCH faster than trying to keep the old paint by doing touch up repairs.
All of my tools hook up to a dust deputy extraction system very little if anything gets into the air from the random orbit sander.  I do wear a respirator while air brushing though.  I didn’t think that there was much overspray when I did Tropic Fun but when I blew my nose after the first round of touch up I found out otherwiseÂ
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I mentioned that the machine was pretty beat up when I got it so there were some internal parts that needed to be fixed now that the cab and head are finished. First off there were three little white gears laying in the coin box and the “total plays meter” was apart and the wheels all spun freely. I figured that these gears were the drive mechanism for that plays meter but there were two missing. I called Steve at Pinball Resource and he said buy a new one on ebay because nobody makes parts so I decided to try to make new gears.
I started by taking a photo of the part and used a micrometer to measure out the part. I then sketched it in vector in inkscape and then made a CNC tool path in VCarve Desktop. I turned out that a 1/16″ bit would cut the part so I cut it in plastic but the plastic melted in the kerf and I could not extract the part so I made up a multi layer ply out of .200 maple veneer with the grain running in different directions for each ply. I used a super thin CA glue to finish and seal the part and it took some adjustment with a file because my part was slightly (few thousandths) oversized but the play meter now works.
These EM machines have big plugs that have 1/8″ pins to connect the backbox and main relay board to the playfield. One of these plugs was shattered when I dropped the playfield off of the rotissary (don’t ask it was a bad time
) so I used some brass rod to reattach two of the broken off pins and used CA glue to join the shattered perf-board back together. I needed a brace to apply to the plug so act as a reinforcer for the shattered perf-board so I drew up a CNC tool path for the part and milled it out of plastic. Unfortunately nothing on the part was a nice standard size in inches except for the pins which were 1/8 inch. I figured a US part from 1973 would be in inches and not the then greatly hated metric system so I never tried measuring in mm. It was like Goldilocks and the three bears, the first run was too small the second too large but the third was just right. Here is a photo of an extra gear and plug brace.
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I then went through the machine and tweaked all of the adjustments that needed to me made to make the machine run correctly like pivot arm contacts, flipper position and multiple leaf switch arm adjustments. The only part that I’m missing is the up credit coil which was burnt to a crisp but a new one is on the way from Pinball Resource. Here is a video testing out all of the game’s functions, remember the game is also missing its backglass so you’ll have to use your imagination there…
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cool man.Â
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Very cool
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Keep the updates coming. I enjoy every bit of it.
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While I’m waiting for the credit advance coil to arrive I worked on getting the backglass done. The machine came with no backglass so I picked up some 3/32″thick glass and cut two sheets to the right size.  I had previously ordered a lift bar from Pinball Life and I used some scrap poster frame to hold the two pieces together with some printed artwork between them just like the printed translight will eventually be held in place.
I used Wildman’s image as the starting point and worked for several days to clean it up in photoshop. Unfortunately there is a wide variation in the colors on Darling backglasses on the internet so I’m not exactly sure what precise colors are in the backglass. Some examples have an almost fluorescent red to them which seems to go along with the red on the playfield but that color will not be possible to print. I’m going to have to go with something a little more subdued.
I made a PDF of the artwork and printed it out on plain paper, taped it all together and cut out the openings. The score reel openings are too large and the height is a little too short but not too bad for a first attempt, at least the lights seem to line up ok..
The backglass will need a mask layer to prevent the light from shining through all of the glass. Original backglasses have a silver layer applied to them but most modern reproductions use black for this. I used another image of a Jubilee backglass (4 player version of Darling) that I distorted in Photoshop to line up with my artwork and made a new mask layer from that. I decreased the size of the reel openings and increased the height of the artwork by 1/8 inch and printed it with the mask layer in green and the artwork set to semitransparent so the mask can show through it.
The match lights. Game Over, Same Player Shoots Again, Player Up, Can Play and Tilt lights line up really well but the Ball in Play lights need to move just a little to the right. The opening for the score reels look much better. A little more tweeking and perhaps a full sized printout from Officemax before fully committing to this design.
I’m going to try out GameOnGraphix for printing this backglass, they quoted me something around $60 for printing which is almost $100 less than I paid for Tropic Fun from another vendor. We’ll see how it turns out. BorgDog I’ll send you all of the artwork with mask layer once it is done so you can use it in your VP Darling game.
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Looks pretty good actually. 60 bucks is very fair price I think! Almost scary low :)
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Agreed, but it is very important to keep your costs down on EM’s that are not super collectable if you want to make more than $1.25 per hour for your labor…
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My replacement coil for the credit reel (called the “Replay Unit” on the schematic) arrived and the credit reel now goes both up and down.
I cycled the machine for a high score and found that the knocker wasn’t firing when a free game was won so I tested the knocker coil and found that it was ok so I started to look through the schematic to find the problem. It turns out that the circuit for the knocker runs though to the coin door and gets its path to ground via the coin switches. Since I was also interested if getting the machine to be able to coin up I spent some more time trying to decipher this complex circuit.
I found that there is a zero position switch on the credit reel that breaks the start up circuit so that you can’t start a game with no credits on the reel. One of the previous owners had bent this leaf switch so that the switch never broke contact even when the zero position was reached. This is how they had set the machine to free play. I was then able to follow the circuit to the coin door and found that the ground wire for the knocker had been cut so this was the reason that the knocker never fired. I resoldered this wire and now “presto-magic” the knocker fires and the machine gives two credits for every quarter and still plays as free play because of the bent zero position leaf switch. This is the best of both worlds because you can play with either coin or free play.
Here’s a video of the working mechs.
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Rotisserie Pinball, yum.
This lets me get at both sides of the playfield easily so I can strip it down to just plywood.
After pulling the pop bumpers, side rails, leaf switches, roll over switches, kickers, flippers, rail system and ball trough I now have a fully striped playfield to start working on.
It’s on its side because the side rails have been removed and the playfield plywood is only about 1/2 thick so I don’t want to chance any warpage. I’ll mount some reinforceing strips along the sides once I get going on to cleaning. This time I’ve going to try a heat gun on the mylar around the pop bumpers. On tropic Fun I worked it off without heat and it lifted some paint that I had to fix. I’m not crazy about having to fix 45 year old florescent paint since making a color match will be difficult at best.
I’ll do a scan after I clean it up for BorgDog and then I’ll rescan it after refinishing it so he can have a “barn find” and “mint” set of graphics to work from.
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