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BorgDog, did you do any machining or polishing of your Diamond Clear? How has it held up over time?
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Just the block sanding down to 2000 grit, no polishing. I don’t remember for sure but I believe I did 800 grit between coats to level and give it tooth, but may have been 400Â
Have not noticed any wear, chipping, cracking or anything like that, but I have not really inspected it for that. It’s been to the NW pinball show twice since I’ve done that and had over 400 plays each time it’s been there, so it’s definitely had a pretty good amount of plays. I watched a thread on Pinside where a guy used it on his Diner and he says after a couple years he has “some ghosting at ball drops (assuming impact), but other than that its held up pretty well”. Pinball Pool, the one I used this on, currently lives at my cabin so can’t check it out for a couple weeks, but I have some maintenance to do on it so I’ll check it out closely then.You need to login in order to like this post: click here
Any good way to protect the table from ball drops? There are two kickers and the ball impact area under these had all of the paint removed over the years. I’ve thought about mylar but in fairness the table has over 50k plays on it so this probably won’t be an issue anytime soon.
Anything that I add to the surface will impact game play. Before I took the table apart I was impressed with how the roll-over button just above the flippers acted as a mini-blocker for center drains if the ball was moving slowly enough and hit it on the edge.
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I would think mylar would be the usual, but like you say I think in home use it shouldn’t be an issue. Pinball Pool has 2 kickers as well and I haven’t’ noticed anything from them, but I also didn’t do full on restoration, just clean, some keylines, level inserts and clear to make smooth.
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Today’s the day that I’ve been putting off for the last half week, wet sanding day…
If you’ve never made a high gloss finish the process is pretty simple, tedious and painfully slow. First you lay down a hard finish, let it cure and then make various degrees of scratches in it until you end up with high gloss. High gloss is nothing more than a finish that has few surface irregularities to it, if you add a few irregularities to diffuse light you get semi-gloss, add more and you get satin, add even more and you get flat.
The process of leveling out the finish requires sanding with increasing fineness of grit, the problem is that fine grit sand paper clogs quickly so you need something to keep the grit clear, that’s where the water in wet sanding comes in. You could start out with 1500 grit paper and skip the progression from 400 to 800 to 1000 to 1500 but it would take a really long time to get the finish flat and level so most folks start out with something like 400 or 600 grit. One thing about wet sanding is that paper cuts less aggressively with water than it does dry so using wet 400 grit is kind of like using 600-800 dry.
Here’s the playfield with the KBS Diamond finish applied with a brush, glossy but not level.
.Here’s the table after wet sanding with 400 grit, dull but level.
Here it is after 800-1000-1500 grits, not much change but what the 800 grit did was take out the deeper 400 grit scratches and replace them with finer 800 grit scratches and the 1000 and 1500 did the same.
Now on to the final four grits of finish, rubbing compound, polishing compound, Miracle X and Paste wax.
The rubbing compound is finer than 1500 grit so it takes out the 1500 grit scratches but it is fairly abrasive as anyone who has used it to take off surface blemishes on an auto finish can testify to. You can now start to see the circular LED work light start to reflect on the surface.
Next on to polishing compound with is finer grit than the rubbing compound. You can see the light’s features start to get clearer in the reflection.
Next onto Miracle-X which takes out the polishing compound’s scratches and lets more of the light’s details show through.
Lastly, a few coats of paste wax to seal the finish and add more gloss to it (plus it smells really good).
The finish on this table is pretty good and I’m not going to put in the time and effort to make it great because after all this is just a 1972 pinball table…
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AMAZING!
Great job! looks so FRIKKING nice :)
Very impressive
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Messing with the VPinball app and push notifications.
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Repopulated the playfield and now ready to leave the rotisserie, look mom no clamps!
Here is everything back together in the cab with the really bad backglass that I’ve been working on getting replaced.
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Looks awesome, nice jobÂ
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Said it before. Machine is very lucky to have such a owner. Looks fantastic and I really have enjoyed reading about the re-build so thank you for sharing.
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Well it looks better then new I would say. Looks like it works perfectly too! As I said before you did a great job and you could even quit your day job and start restoring pins! If you could take the pay cut that is :)
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Messing with the VPinball app and push notifications.
So if you haven't downloaded app yet what are you waiting for!?
for IOS and Android********************************************************
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Great job, well done. Have you joined a support group yet because man, these fecking things multiply, it’s like tribbles!
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I went with the cheap route for making a new backglass and sent the scans off to ArcadeClassics to have them printed. If I want to have any chance at turning a profit on selling this machine I need to keep the repair costs down since after all it is a 1970’s EM machine and they are not super valuable. The cost for the printing was about $150 (compared to $300+ and a minimum of 6 weeks wait at another vendor) and it took about a week to get the printing.
The printing came in a tube on .030 polycarb which needs a glass to be attached to. Since the original backglass was complete trash (not even worth mounting on the wall) I scraped it down to bare tempered glass and mounted the polycarb on the backside. I immediately noticed that the polycarb printing was 25″ tall and the backglass is 25.5″ and I was wondering how that could be? I went back to the original Photoshop file and checked the size and was dumbfounded to find that I never check the stupid measurement, it was 25″ tall. Measure twice, cut once has been hammered into my brain since I first started woodworking as a seven or eight year old, how I missed this is beyond me.
The good news is that 1/2″ over 25.5″ is not an insurmountable problem. I did several test fits with the backglass and managed to find a positioning that lines up all of the lights and reels in an acceptable fashion. I did need to add 1/2″ of black plastic fill at the top of the graphic but that is not noticeable unless you are looking for it since that part of the backglass is in the shadow of the top rim.
Here’s a photo of the crappy old bg, my youngest asked me what skin condition the bathing beauty suffers from. This backglass was just gross to look at…
And the new bg front and back with the black plastic “trim” at the top to fill the open space
Here’s it in the machine with and without lights on.
I sent a message to Classic Arcades to see what the cost of reprinting is. My guess is that it will be too high to mess with so if after a couple of days the score reel placement bothers me, I might remove the score reel mounts, fill the holes and move them down about 1/8″ to better center the reels on the openings top to bottom.
So… What do Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville and my new back glass have in common? “I know it’s my own d%@* fault!”
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Skin condition! thats funny stuff.
Looks fantastic! GREAT job and a GREAT thread! Congrats on this restore and im guessing it wont be your last?
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Messing with the VPinball app and push notifications.
So if you haven't downloaded app yet what are you waiting for!?
for IOS and Android********************************************************
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I’d love to do another restoration but after 97 LED’s at about a buck a piece, a few new coils, new glass, leg levelers, paint and finishing supplies, new backglass, schematic and instruction manual I’ll probably turn a profit of about 25 cents an hour for my labor!
Having said this, it has been an absolute blast working on this and as a side benefit I really understand how these EMs work which will only help in making better VP EM tables. I also plan on taking some high fidelity sound recordings of the mechanisms for the table and incorporating those into a VP version of Tropic Fun.
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Backglass looks good. If I was going to be keeping it for myself I would live with the doctored version but if I planned on selling it I would not allow myself to sell it with that error, would probably put the original back skin condition and all, but too late for that so I would have it reprinted, and make a wall-hanger out of the miss-sized one. But that’s just my opinion man.Â
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Yeah, it’s not optimal but the old glass was really bad so it had to go. If the machine doesn’t sell with the new bg I’ll replace it since it is a 70’s EM not MB.
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