Repainting the playfield art on our 1979 Bally Star Trek Pinball Machine!

alright folks we're going to start working on the play field as you can see it's pretty dirty and it's missing a little bit of paint so we're gonna try to make this thing look much better it's not going to be perfect it's not gonna be mint but it'll be better than this so we've got wear a pin we've got a little bit of where there where here around the saucer we got a little bit of where there around the saucer got somewhere around these miss lettering and you can see some of this is coming off the thing we'll see how much of this survives we're there we're here really bad we're in the middle a little bit of we're here a little bit of we're there so this is what we're starting with so first thing we're gonna do is clean off some of this dirt this is how it ended up after the initial cleaning basically we're just getting the dirt off of it and we noticed look at this there is actually white paint overspray all over the bottom half of it I thought that was like this stuff that's part of the art OOP that's overspray from something so we're going to try to take that off with a magic eraser and clean it up a little bit more so we're gonna start in on that and we'll see if we can get that better whenever you're using a magic eraser you gotta be careful around edges where the paint's already lifting cuz you'll just take it all up if you if you're not careful so we're gonna try not to get too aggressive but we got to get all of that overspray off or most of it off so that's next you can see how the magic eraser is doing a pretty good job the those white dots there are the original art you can see how they yeah the overspray is there but it's not here where I cleaned it on that mile or a half circle over here you can kind of see all this stuff looks horrible but it'll it'll clean up good we're gonna repaint some of that you kind of see here in the difference so that's the over spring and then that's after it's been cleaned up so we'll keep at it okay so this is what we came up with after our initial cleaning just the initial folks this isn't final which we did with a magic eraser and alcohol so you cleaned up pretty good obviously there are major issues right here so we're gonna try to repaint a bunch of this stuff because it's a Star Trek you gotta get it looking better than that most people would throw that make no doubt about it most people would throw this playfield in the trash absolutely but we're gonna try to save it shouldn't say try we're definitely gonna save it but you can see all the problem areas we're nez we're so we shall see what we can do so the first thing I'm going to do we have an overlay that goes over this part I'm going to pull that out and see how good of a fit that is and then see how much I need to paint around it I know I need to repaint all the balloons and we'll have to we'll have to get together a plan of what we're gonna repaint first so maybe maybe the green first I don't know I've got a big task ahead of us here we'll see what we can do okay so we went and inked in a bunch of stuff I ain't done a lot of the inserts with a black a black acrylic paint marker not to be confused with a sharpie if you if you use acrylic paint you can clear coat over it and it won't bleed or anything if you use a sharpie sometimes it'll bleed after you're done so we ain't in a lot of the stuff that was missing just so we could kind of tell and the way we did it was I just took a picture online of how it's supposed to look and just freehand it back in what was missing so it's not perfect but it'll do especially after we get all the paint and everything on it the hardest part I think it's gonna be getting the lettering right but luckily it looks like a five-year-old growth through it so I might be able to match that and then there was a little bit missing here so what I did after that was I started mixing paint so I took some of this citron green and I took some of this kelly green and I mixed the two together then I got this which looks a little bright so I put a little tiny bit of it on one spot and I don't know how well the camera will show it but it's a it is it's a little too vivid and it's a little it's slightly too dark so I'm gonna try to put like like to get it looks like it the green that's on the playfield is a little more yellow so I'm gonna add in some kind of like a dirty yellow to kind of make it more yellow and at the same time make it kind of more faded looking so we'll see if that works but I've got to put it there and I've got a little bit of green trim here like that explosion looking pink and then I've got some of these little inserts that are green and I've got a little bit of lining up here that's green so not too much green so I did it first so we'll uh we'll let this green dry and then I'll try mixing in a little yellow and see if it makes it a little more like it okay so I have mixed up an unholy concoction of lots of yellows and different greens and even a few Browns and I put like one drop of red to make it less vivid so basically if you're if the colors to like too intense if you put the opposite color on the color wheel on it it will knock some of that off so this top one right there is my latest so I'm gonna let that dry a little bit and see if we're close enough this one you can tell so if you're looking at these the way you can kind of figure it out is okay so what is Green Green is yellow and blue right you get top that in like kindergarten so this color is a combination of yellow and blue so is this is this color that I painted on compared to the original color is it more green I mean more yellow the net color or more blue than it color it's slightly darker and it's a little bit more blue right so the way you would get it more like how you want it is to add more yellow and since it's a little since it's a little dull to make it a little bit more intense like the green is you would want to put yellow and you would want to put like a real bright yellow so I'm not perfect with this stuff but the more you mess around with it you know you kind of learn how to do it so I put like a really bright yellow in it and another thing is if you're trying to lighten the color you kind of need a lot of paint so I've already I've already poured this out two or three times about half of it so I poured about half out and mix some more wasn't quite right pour about half out again make some more wasn't quite right so you just have to kind of work through it a lot and keep going to keep going and keep going and keep going and luckily acrylic paint dries pretty quick so you just keep messing with it until you think you've got it right and then go ahead and paint in all of the green and then you work on your next color so you don't have to get it perfect you just want it to look where it hides it a little bit so of course the most important color will be the blue but we'll get the green right and then we'll move on so I'll keep messing with it if that's if that ends up being proper the right color then I'll go ahead and paint in all the green and we'll take a video but if it's not we'll mix it a little more okay so the green ended up being pretty good so we went ahead and added in all the green that was missing and of course all this will get read lined with black ink and clear coated so we had some green spots over there some green spots over there and of course this middle part here was the word added it back in or I guess this this earth was the worst it's not a perfect match but it's pretty close so we're happy with it or these a little bit of the line was missing on this these over here so we are actually done with the green so now we're trying to get this yellow right which is probably gonna be the toughest part yellow is tough yellow and red are kind of hard because they just I think your eye picks up different colors better so like yellow if it's off a little bit it's obvious so that we're never going to get this where it looks exactly the same now if you had the time and we're patient enough you could repaint the whole thing and then you wouldn't really notice or you could put the overlay on it that we've gotten which we may send up still doing if this looks like crap after I'm done with it we'll put that overlay on it but if I can get it looking pretty good I think it would be better to have the original wood and then have the overlay so we're gonna try that so the first thing I did was I got one of our yellow colors and I dabbed a little bit on here so you can see how your main problem that you have whenever you're trying to do yellow is that it's just too clean looking so anything that's you know that might be a decent match for this where you don't have much wear but anything that gets a lot of wear you can see it real good down here basically the ball can't touch this area because that bars in the way so this part here has never had the ball touch it and you can see the the wear around it where then you can see the difference between that yellow and that well that's how it's going to look whenever I paint it you know the pair the part that I paint is gonna be clean like that and the part next - it's gonna be like that so it's gonna be hard to kind of get a happy medium so basically there are little tiny swirls in the paint hopefully that will show pretty good there are little tiny cracks in the paint that the ball is done yeah that shows it good there so there's little tiny cracks and there's dirt embedded in those cracks so whenever you use a magic eraser the reason it cleans it up so well is because magic magic eraser has little tiny particles that get way down inside those cracks and clean it up so they didn't get it perfect but it was a lot worse as you saw at the beginning of the video so the yellow is no longer really yellow because whenever you're like two feet away as you're standing here playing it you don't see all those little cracks you just see that there's something a little darker mixed in with the yellow and your a doesn't really defined it and so the the yellow is like a like a it's got like a brown haze over it so we're going to take yellow and kind of make it a little darker and just try to get it to match that faded yellow which is it's tough to do but as you can see it's not even close right out of the can you're right out of the bottle we've got a bunch of different yellows none of them really close that one was the closest so we're gonna add like just a since it's too vivid we're gonna try to make it a little more dull so again you do the opposite color on the color wheel so if you had just like a little tiny tiny tiny bit of purple it'll knock it down a little bit to where it's a little more dull so we're gonna try that and see what that looks like and then if that doesn't do it maybe we had a little more or we had a little maybe like a little Brown to make it look a little dingy a little more dingy so we'll just we're gonna mess around with that a little bit and see how close we can get it no right so I took that yellow and I added one tiny drop of purple just one drop folks and it did knock it down a little bit of metal a little more dull maybe a little bit too much I don't know but this is like you know ball playing position right so you won't be playing from about here maybe a little higher maybe about like this so you saw how it was before basically I kind of feathered the yellow in starting about here and going up and then I took a black a black acrylic paint pen and touched up the places where the some of the lettering was gone and then once I got to here like pretty much all the lettering was gone and that one was completely gone so what do you think is that a pretty good match yellow wise and then the other bad spot of course was up here so playing position you're gonna be about about right here my whole point being you're not real close to it you know so a lot of people would never even know you know a lot of people wouldn't even be able to tell now if you get close to it you can tell obviously all this was gone where most of that was gone but not bad right I'm an amateur folks for an amateur that's about as good as it gets so to get real close you can see that everything is not as it seems a little better so you can see that it courses all been touched up and by the time you get down to here most of the paints the original I don't know pretty close match really I think the rule that I always go by is make it if you can't make it the exact color where you cannot even discern a difference make it slightly darker if it's a little bit too light you'll see it but if it's a little bit too dark it just looks kind of worn you know it looks natural this machine's 40 years old you know so it doesn't have to look brand new and the other mistake I think a lot of people make as they try to make it look brand new which is very hard to do I mean the thing everything on this is faded so you're not gonna really get it perfect but I'm pretty happy with that so I think that's better than what you guys leave your comments below what do you think is that better repainting it like that where it's obviously been repainted people can obviously tell is it better to have it like that and I'm gonna do the blue still of course here in a few minutes is it better to have it like that or would it be better to put the overlay on it I don't know man I think I think it looks better painted in just my opinion but yeah we're gonna keep working the other ones and then we're gonna clearcoat it too so it won't ever wear again it'll be permanent but what that also means whenever we clear code it is that all these ball swirls will be permanent there won't be any fix in that but if we don't do something about it it'll get worse and worse and worse so we've got to stop the madness now and like I said at the beginning of the video a lot of people that are like real collectors they would have thrown this thing away they to fix this there's no way they would have little acrylic craft paint out repainting major areas of the playfield I think a lot of people would have trashed it but we're not going to we're gonna save it damn it yeah I said it go ahead and report me to youtube I don't care I said it we're going to save it damn it so next up I think what I'll do is I think I'll do the other kind of hard thing this kind of cream color so this originally was what passed for white but over the years it's faded faded faded faded faded faded faded so now it's it's more of like a creamish almost like a light brown so I think maybe I'll do that next and then I'll do some red I think I'm going to kind of save whoa wait a minute I'm not gonna do that next because I kind of need the cream to do these little stars so when I repaint this blue I'm gonna have to put a few of these little dots on it to make it kind of blend in which will be the same color as that so let's not do that yet maybe I'll do a little red work up here there's a little bit of red that's worn so we'll do a little bit of red and maybe we'll do a little bit of orange right red and orange red and orange and then after we do that we won't have anything really left except the blue and the cream so maybe we do red and orange next so although I'll see what I can come up with here but I think we're doing pretty good not bad it's coming along nicely alright so I did the red and the orange and so I did it just like the other ones mix mix mix mix mix mix it's not a perfect match this was the worst spot for the red you can kind of see that it's a little off but not too bad and worse mooring through here of course there was various things up and through here and I added a little bit here there was a little bit here and then you know this was all kind of messed up I got that back right or close enough to right and then over here you can tell a little bit and then we did the orange and so the orange was just in a few spots and I had one right out of the bottle that was already about as close as I could get it so this is the worst spot right there and there's a little bit there and of course the spots here that we're missing it this is the worst part of the playfield so far I don't have it quite perfect but it's kind of busy there so hopefully it'll blend in a little bit so we have arrived at the great moment that we're going to do the blue so I'll show you a little more of that just so that you can see it as it as it goes down you can feel like you're part of the process okay folks so we are beginning the blue the great blue paint debacle of 2018 so we've got some heavy we're up here so this is a good place to do a test because it's way up at the top and play field so I've put a little bit of what are they calling this Calypso blue just right out of the bottle right poured out a little bit of Calypso blue and put it on it so this is an interesting one here so you got to think about with the color Widow and all that kind of stuff so the blue the hue is kind of the same you know right but it's a little too light and it's a little too vivid like we were talking about earlier so on the color wits of the way you knock it down to make it not as vivid as you put the opposite color on the color wheel so on the color wheel opposite color blue is yellow which kind of makes sense because that's the way this whole thing is faded it's faded yellow so this was originally white but now it's yellow right so this originally probably was a pretty close match to the original color on the playfield before it faded so that is actually probably a little bit closer to this right you see it's a little less faded under the mylar but basically everything on the playfield has like a yellow cast over it I don't know how much that'll show up on the camera but so I'm going to try and I need to go darker with it so I'm gonna try it to put just a drop of like like a darker well I don't know if I have a dark yellow but like a a kind of orange or yellow you know so I'm gonna try something like that and put just a drop in it in my mix and then try it next to it and see if it's a little better so we'll do that and come back alright so there is our blue that we were doing and then next to it you can see we put in some Brown which is you know kind of like Dork yellow okay so we put that in and it worked but Brown is kind of green you know so took it took it a little bit too green so you can see that's a little more green than the background and it's still a little light too so what I'm gonna try is I'm gonna try putting some dark blue in it just a little bit to try to pull it back blue and make it a little darker so we'll try that next alright so this is where we are right now I'm thinking we're getting there it's still a little off so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put a little bit of like dark green in it because it needs to be a little more green and it still needs to be darker darker darker darker ok people so we're getting closer you can see that's what we're painting and it pretty much matches this it's very close to the unfaded part underneath this mylar but it doesn't it still doesn't match the the faded port so we're gonna go a little more with it same thing up here this is the same color very close but not quite close enough I want to go a little darker with it to get to get it a little bit more like the faded parts I think what I'm gonna do is try a little bit more of the brown alright folks I think we've got a pretty good match here it's a little bit too green but I don't think you're gonna see it once we get the stiffles on it and in person I can't even see it I can see it a little bit on the camera but I think it's it actually looks a little bit too blue in persons I don't know I'm thinking maybe we split the difference but um it seems to be blended in pretty good so I'm gonna go with it and this one down here was too blue so we will uh paint in a bunch of the blue and then we'll see how it looks all right so we're putting some of it in here thought maybe you might want to see some of it actually go on especially in that really bad area now we got to go back and touch it all up now this is the part right here where I was testing it earlier so it's a little bit too light so I'm trying to put on lighter coats than I usually do because I keep having the problem where I put the coat on too thick and then you can see brush I'm in not brush strokes but you can see like texture because the paint's actually piled up it's not perfectly flat I'm trying to get better the older we get this isn't gonna look perfect but I think it's gonna look a heck of a lot better than major areas of the playfield missing and I said we're gonna go back in and with the black and redo a lot of the lines make them thicker and of course we got to redo around a lot of the inserts and stuff kind of trying to feather it in a little bit in the like you don't want to paint all this and leave that one little spot because then it you know since it's gonna be slightly different you would notice it so so like a line like that around that insert would get redone normally when we're doing this we'd have music going in the background but if I do that YouTube YouTube gets very upset if you're playing music in the background so we don't want to upset anybody I don't want to get sued by Katy Perry or anything so we don't put any music on our videos so I'm going to finish that up and then we'll let it start drying and see how it see if it evens out it looks pretty good okay so this is how it all dried it kind of looks on the camera how it looks in person right now or earlier when I was filming it at the camera it looked real green but in person it looks it's blue so I don't know I got to go with what my eyes see people but it looks pretty good now of course when we add the starfield back in that will cover up a bunch of it too and blend it in a little bit if we get that color yellow enough it needs to be that yellow right touched up around these all this was touched up there was a bunch of like little spots here and there around the ship and things and of course the big ugly spots there the big spot up here there was some there a couple little spots here so there are actually two colors left there is a the cream that'll be all of the little stars and some of the ship and a lot of this part of the ship and then there's also this light blue that's just some of the shadows on the ship and in a couple other places this of course is also a cream color so we're getting there we're down to two colors people and a lot of black ink so I think that's it for today tomorrow we'll come back and do the cream but guess what through the magic of YouTube you won't have to wait till tomorrow that will happen right now okay folks so we're starting in on the cream-colored yellow colored kind of thingy so you can see how it's pretty close but if you look over here in the middle of the playfield it's not as close it's a little too bright so I'm trying to mute it a little bit and I think what I've got going on is the it's the cream is actually kind of a yellow and it's I think not quite green enough like it needs a little more green in it to go from there to there so I'm adding like a little bit of a darker green a little bit at a time a little bit at a time trying to green it up a little bit so I'm gonna keep going that way and see if we get a little closer on that middle board okay so I've been mixed mix mixing and I added a little bit of green which did make it match a little bit better but then it was a little bit too vivid like I keep running into because all of this has faded so what I did was I did the same trick I did earlier I added a little bit of purple which is the opposite color of like yellow so I added a little bit of purple and it made it just like one drop of purple and it made it just a little more dull and made it kind of match so I repainted in some of this stuff and I repaid it in some of this stuff and it's a pretty good match I think we're looking pretty good on it I've repainted that and again I have to go back and rethink all of the black I also kind of feathered in some of the stuff that was missing in here but I have to reinker the lettering over it now so the only the worst place for all of that was right through here you know obviously there was a lot of where there so the other thing that this is used for is all of the little stars so if you look at how they did that it's just kind of a random assortment of different sizes and they're kind of all over everything like if you look they're everywhere so you can see where I painted there but they don't have the Stars so you can kind of see it because it's the only area that doesn't have any stars same thing with up there so to make those little tiny dots what I'm going to what up what I've been doing is I have this little wire you could use like a a safety pin maybe something like that and so I am just dipping it in the paint getting a healthy little bit on there and then we'll just make it happen and as the paint starts to go off the stars get kind of smaller so I'm just kind of stippling them in like that I'm just gonna keep adding them you can see I did a few over here I'm just gonna keep adding it and adding it and adding it until it blends in enough that your eye won't catch most of it and then what I have left is I need to re-ink a lot of the black lines and I need to still do this light blue color you can see I did kind of the middle part of the cream but didn't do the outside torch because they were still fine so I tried to kind of stop where there was a line somewhere so that maybe your I wouldn't notice it's a slightly different color so I'm gonna do a whole bunch of I got about 500 more dots to do and after I do that I'll show it to you and then we'll we'll figure out the blue okay folks so here's what we came up with after we added in the Stars and stuff this one was completely gone so had to completely repaint that one and this one up here I made - and then of course we added in all the little stiffles everywhere I think it helped a lot to blend it in it's not perfect but at first glance you might not tell so for instance this is original right but I all that I added in and that's original but all that was at it so whenever you do it one of the things you have to do if you end up having to do something like this is you're trying to make it look completely random so you have to run some of them right up to your other art right on the edge of it like it goes behind it if you if you keep stopping right before you get to it it'll look like there'll be like a halo effect around it it won't look it won't blend in so I think that worked out pretty good and then there was a bunch around there and then that big spot up here what do you think it looks pretty good I am happy with it so we have two things left to do I've got to do this light blue because some of its missing on the ship there you can see and some of its missing on the photon or whatever that is it's shooting the fat part because they're using it as like shadowing so it goes like this continues to go up around and then this side is almost all like that so it's kind of like a shadow on it so I need to mix that and I think that's the only place on the play field that it's really used there's a little tiny bit a little tiny bit of it right there but it's just used as a shadow on the objects that are white none of that's missing that a bit so I just need it through the shadow around the ship the enterprise and around this little 100-point saucer and I think that'll be it for the color and then after I get done with that I need to go back in and make all of my lines look a little bit better on my black lines and when I do that I will finish up the thousands like up there and things like that so so I will get to mixing on that light blue okay folks so we painted in the blue and we I mean the white blue and we re inked some of the lines and then we sprayed some clear coat on it and it came out pretty good now you'll notice where we repainted does look a little more green than the blue so the camera wasn't lying whenever it was showing me that before but other than that it looks pretty good so this area up here was pretty worn it's not perfect I had to redo some of the lettering I never had great handwriting much less paintbrush handwriting and then this part came out pretty good it's not perfect you can tell if you're really looking for it but once all the plastics and everything are on I think it'll look pretty good and then of course this was the most romantic area where major parts were going came out pretty good not perfect but pretty good we think it'll pass once we get it all lit up and all the plastics on and everything I think it'll look great so there you have it I hope you enjoyed the video now we will do one more video of us putting everything back on the playfield and repairing the bottom of the playfield testing it all out getting the game ready to go Oh on the clear coat the way we do it you can do it different ways the way we do it is we literally have just clear coat in a spray paint can and just spray it on that is not the best way to do it but we don't really have the time to do it the best way to do it so the best way to do it would be to take everything off the play field underneath the play field and everything even take the rails off take all the switches off take all the light sockets out you can probably do it with the light sockets in but and then go take it to like a someone who can paint it with automotive clear coat but let's be realistic here people we've just touched up by hand paint all over the plate field this is not like a collector's quality of machine anymore it didn't even have that potential with all of that wear on it so this is just us doing what we can to save a machine that had major major wear on it so we touched up the paint we cleaned it up the best we could and then we sprayed clear on it so that it won't flake off anymore so this is this is something that an amateur can do obviously we're amateurs at this kind of thing this is something that an amateur can do if you run across a machine that needs some work we're not really advocates of getting the thing perfect because you're just gonna play it you know as long as it looks pretty good we're happy with it now if you've got one that's in really nice original shape yeah do whatever you can to keep it in original shape keep it a collector's quality machine but this is a player's machine you know we we were able to fix up the the worn paint and I think a lot of people would probably be proud to have this in there and gameroom so that is that now if you like all the trouble we went through to film this video give us a thumbs up and leave your comments below let us know what you think about it and if you think it's decent if you think it's horrible if you uh reminds me of a funny joke if you think we should have burned it or if you think we saved another one leave your comments below you can stop by and see us too if you want we're in downtown Rock Hill South Carolina we're about 15 miles south of Charlotte North Carolina and you can always check out the games that we have for sale on our website go to lions arcade comm and check it out but leave your comments below tell us what you what you think about what went down here maybe post up some links if you get stuff you've repainted and we will see you on the next video hope you enjoyed it [Music] you