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Butch Peel’s How to Color Match Your Pinball Playfield & Cabinet Art

Marco Pinball·video·1h 26m·analyzed·May 21, 2026
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claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.028

TL;DR

Butch Peel teaches pinball restoration color matching, painting, and repair techniques.

Summary

Butch Peel, a pinball restoration specialist and former Jersey Jack Pinball manual writer, delivers a comprehensive tutorial on playfield and cabinet art color matching and restoration techniques. He covers paint theory (color mixing, pigment selection, light fastness), surface preparation, brush techniques, wood repair methods, airbrusing, and toy restoration, illustrated through detailed examples from his personal collection including High-Speed, Monster Bash, F-14 Tomcat, and Space Shuttle.

Key Claims

  • Butch Peel wrote the first five manuals for Jersey Jack Pinball, including the Pulp Fiction manual

    high confidence · Butch Peel self-identifying his work history at Golden State Pinball show

  • Yellow and blue do not actually make green when mixed in paint; proper green requires understanding the color wheel with intermediate hues like orange-yellow and blue-green

    high confidence · Butch Peel teaching core color theory lesson from painting instruction materials

  • Transparent reds used in vintage getaway cabinets fade and turn pink over time due to poor light fastness, requiring white primer underneath

    high confidence · Butch Peel explaining pigment light fastness and real-world cabinet fading examples

  • Playfield surface should be roughed with 800-grit sandpaper before touch-up painting and clear coating to provide 'tooth' for adhesion

    high confidence · Butch Peel explaining surface preparation technique for touch-up work

  • Water-thin super glue can reinforce wood fibers on pinball playfields experiencing delamination and splintering around holes

    high confidence · Butch Peel demonstrating wood repair technique verified by audience nodding

  • Naphtha-wet rags allow restorers to preview how touch-up paint will look after clear coating is applied

    high confidence · Butch Peel sharing practical tip for quality checking restoration work

  • Acetate (old overhead transparency material) works well as a non-porous surface for mixing small amounts of paint and as a hand protector during painting

    high confidence · Butch Peel recommending specific materials and techniques used in his restoration work

  • Butch spent one year restoring the cabinet and one year on the playfield of his Space Shuttle machine acquired from an eBay convenience store find

    high confidence · Butch Peel describing his extensive Space Shuttle restoration project timeline

Notable Quotes

  • “You become a pinball repairman and a pinball owner on the same day.”

    Butch Peel@ 3:00 — Core insight about pinball ownership and the necessity of repair skills

  • “There's two kinds of pinball machines. There's the broken ones and then the ones that are about to break.”

    Butch Peel@ 3:06 — Humorous but accurate reflection on pinball machine reliability and maintenance demands

  • “Yellow and blue don't really make green. You think they do, but they don't.”

    Butch Peel@ 7:47 — Foundational color theory lesson that surprised him and is central to the tutorial

  • “The best way to keep them [brushes] pointed is to lick them... the saliva dries and it keeps everything... you don't want bristles going out like that, because every time you try and paint with that, you're getting paint wherever there might be a stray bristle.”

    Butch Peel@ 22:26 — Practical but unconventional brush care technique from experienced restorer

  • “If I do this, can I make it look better than it currently does? Hell yeah, I can.”

    Butch Peel@ 52:15 — Describes his decision-making approach to tackling restoration challenges

  • “This looks like it was painted by a blind four-year-old.”

    Butch Peel@ 52:01 — Humorous description of original paint quality on purchased Dracula toy figure

Entities

Butch PeelpersonJersey Jack PinballcompanyMarco PinballorganizationLiquitexcompanyGolden State PinballeventHigh-SpeedgameMonster BashgameF-14 Tomcat

Signals

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Comprehensive framework for pinball playfield and cabinet art color matching using color wheel theory, pigment selection by light fastness rating, and professional paint products like Liquitex

    high · Butch Peel's detailed explanation of color theory, pigment characteristics (light fastness, opacity, hue), and specific paint product recommendations

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Critical surface prep methods including 800-grit sanding for adhesion tooth, naphtha wiping for cleanliness, and understanding how to work with clear coat expectations

    high · Detailed discussion of sanding, cleaning, and preparation workflows before touch-up painting and clear coating

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Multiple wood damage repair techniques for playfields: water-thin super glue for delamination and fiber reinforcement, plastic-wrapped putty for hole filling, repositioning of loose posts and brackets

    high · Butch Peel demonstrating specific products and techniques for common playfield wood damage patterns

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Professional hand-painting methods for small touch-ups: using long-bristle liners for detail work, moisture control with water and acrylic medium, toothpick blending for edge control, saliva-pointed brush storage

    high · Detailed walkthrough of brush selection, cleaning, maintenance, and application techniques

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Airbrush application methodology including thin paint consistency, overlapping dust coats, feathering edges, frisket paper masking, and immediate frisket removal to avoid adhesion issues

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.260

0:00
Firecracker extraordinaire. Yeah. Eat, sleep, drink pinball. I hope you all have a great time at the show. We also have our Linz Arcade Camp in the far back. Come play games with us. Come listen to cool live music. We have lots of beer for the plenty. So it's going to be fun times at Camp Silver Ball. But today and now we have the wonderful Butch Peel here to teach us about some pinball restoration tips he has for us. So we're going to let him introduce himself and take it away, Butch.
0:39
We'll do, we'll do. Thank you. Yay! Thank you. It's been a couple of years since I've been here at the show. Happy to be back. I attended the first two Golden State Pinball shows. I worked for Jersey Jack Pinball at the time.
0:55
For those of you who don't know me, my name is Butch Peel. My real job in kind of my retirement gig after I retired from being an adult was to do pinball manuals. So I wrote the first five manuals for Jersey Jack Pinball. I wrote the manual for Pulp Fiction. A
1:43
A lot of people doing volunteer work and bringing their games in. Pinball machines aren't like matchbox cars. They're hard to bring in and set up and show off. So it's really cool that these people are willing to do this and allows guys like me to just come here and hit the ground running and help out where I can. It's just really cool to be able to play pinball all weekend. So make sure everybody that's involved, vendors, things like that, know you appreciate them being here A

“You're constantly going back and forth touching up... you're like constantly coming back with the opposite color paint and trying to fix it.”

Butch Peel@ 54:13 — Describes the iterative, detail-oriented nature of fine restoration work

game
Space Shuttlegame
Batman Forevergame
Frankensteingame
Draculagame
Williamscompany
Pulp Fictiongame
Linz Arcade Campevent

high · Butch Peel explaining airbrush-specific mixing ratios, spray patterns, and masking techniques

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Detailed toy figure repainting including original decal removal and reapplication, multi-color layering (Igor and Dracula examples), detail work with highlights and shading, and matching existing paint schemes

    high · Extended examples showing Dracula and Igor figures with before/after documentation of paint work

  • ?

    restoration_signal: Cabinet exterior restoration including striping (via masking tape and stencils), spray painting with rattle cans, matching mirror-image designs on opposite sides, and metal hardware replacement

    high · Space Shuttle machine example showing stencil creation, red/white striping technique, and cabinet hardware replacement decisions

  • ?

    design_philosophy: Butch Peel's philosophy emphasizes incremental skill building, starting with small detail work before tackling large areas, researching original artwork for accuracy, and assessing whether restoration will improve the machine's appearance

    high · His discussion of buying a book to learn color theory, starting with small areas, and deciding 'can I make it look better than it is now?'

  • ?

    content_signal: Marco Pinball hosting detailed restoration tutorial with established industry figure; content focuses on hands-on techniques and tool recommendations for collector-level restoration work

    high · Golden State Pinball show presentation format with visual demonstrations and detailed technical instruction

  • ?

    personnel_signal: Butch Peel established as respected restoration and documentation expert with deep experience across multiple eras of machines; former Jersey Jack Pinball manual writer indicates design-phase involvement

    high · Self-identification as first five manual writer for JJP, personal collection spanning multiple decades, detailed technical knowledge

  • ?

    community_signal: Active sharing of specialized restoration techniques and material recommendations within pinball enthusiast community at shows and public presentations

    high · Butch Peel presenting detailed tutorial, recommending specific products (Liquitex, acetate, naphtha), encouraging hands-on learning

  • $

    market_signal: Secondary market machines being sourced from unconventional venues (convenience stores) with significant restoration needs; eBay as source for detailed condition descriptions and acquisition

    medium · Space Shuttle machine acquired via eBay from convenience store operator with detailed condition notes; extensive restoration work justified by original quality components

    • 2:43
    I'll need some loving. It's really nice to be able to restore them. It's very satisfying. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that and some of my experiences. I've been working on pinball machines since I started collecting about 1983-ish, something like that. I got my first pinball machine. So I tell people you become a pinball repairman and a pinball owner on the same day. And the other things I'd like to tell you about pinball is there's two kinds of pinball machines. There's the broken ones and then the ones that are about to break. A lot of fun. So the need for color matching and touch-up skills. You get some of these old games. They basically are their own worst enemy to begin with. There's nothing like a pinball machine that tries to destroy itself in entertaining us at the same time, right? So you've got a steel ball going against plastic and wood and pieces of metal, and you know what's going to win. Thank you. I've done here and the things that I've learned were back in the day when reproduction parts were at a bare minimum. You could get new parts, but it was new old stock parts and old stock men had been sitting on somebody's shelf for a long time. And that in and of itself can make things brittle, can make them, the colors dull, all those sorts of things. So trying to restore them to their original beauty, it's very satisfying when you can do that. Thank you. Well, the first thing is you need to find a project. So check. I bought a beat-up old high-speed game, and I drove all the way out to San Diego and picked it up. I think I paid $695 for it back in the day. And stripped some of this off, and the more things I took off and got to see more of the play field, the more, oh, my God, this is really bad.
    6:27
    But, you know, some of this stuff that we have on the play field, you know, I think I can paint bushes. I think I can match green. I can, you know, match some of these grays and things like that.
    6:39
    Let's give it a try. So I've got to get your confidence up a little bit, get to where you think you can do that. No problem there. I've never been afraid to try something new. Buy some paint. I'm like, okay, I'm kind of transformed back to where I was, transported back to where I was in grade school. Thank you. And then all of a sudden you're back at step three again because you realize that's not a good enough paint. Those colors are not doing anything. You mix yellow and blue there, you get mud. And it's like, how did that happen? So the most important lesson that I learned was find a good book, somebody who knows how to do this. And the first lesson was yellow and blue don't really make green. You think they do, but they don't. So this is the version of the book that I got. I started recommending this to people a while back and I realized that the second edition is really the one you want to look for because it has a lot more color patches and stuff. I've got the book in my computer case over here if anybody wants to look at it afterwards. But the second edition has a lot more information and a lot more useful information.
    8:18
    So basically the lesson to learn there is it takes you to the rainbow. Think of the rainbow. You've got the color red goes into color orange, then into yellow, and then to green, and then into cyan and blue, and all the way into indigo, and then violet, and then rolls back around and goes back into red again. So a rainbow is a constantly repeating sort of thing.
    8:42
    You still have your main red, yellow, and blue colors, but what this guy teaches in the book is there's two of each of those. So on the yellow side of red, there's an orange red. And on the red side of yellow, there's an orange yellow. And if you want to make a really pretty bright orange color, you have to mix orange yellow with orange red.
    9:12
    Like on the opposite side, you've got a green yellow and a blue green and a violet blue. A very interesting story. Thank you. A
    10:49
    specific pigments that I need to make the colors that I want to make. And so you go to a company like Liquitex. They've been doing this since 1955. They publish a ton of useful information on the web. You can get PDFs and free literature that support their products. And you can learn a heck of a lot just reading a few pages. Like this one page has some of the most interesting information on here. A
    11:45
    Thank you. I'm going to show you how to make a paintbrush. A milky, watery substance that you add to it, but it doesn't break down the acrylic emulsion. It actually helps bind it and at the same time thin it to the point where I can spread it easily with a brush. It's very, very useful.
    13:03
    So there are some important paint characteristics that are going to come into play, especially for pinball stuff. You need something that's durable. Thank you. Translucent is kind of in between the two and opaque is where you can't see through it. So I could take something that had a black line across it and with an opaque yellow I could paint right over the top of it and the black wouldn't show through. Translucent would show through a little bit. Transparent would show through quite a bit.
    14:58
    Light fastness is the last thing that we need to worry about. And that is how well this is going to hold up with sunlight and fluorescent lighting and LED lighting and all the other things that we have in pinball machines, which is another big part of what we have. And then you can look on the bottles of the Liquitex paint and they show you all of the different characteristics they have. They have a chroma value so that you can see where on the color scale these colors. This is a violet red and this is an orange red next to one another here. And you can see the light fastness is excellent on this one. The hue is in the 4.5 range, 3.6 here, just to give you an idea of where things are. And you can get the, most importantly, these are the pigments used to make these colors. And what that means is when I buy a bottle of this red paint here and it has PR 108 on it Thank you for watching. Thank you. A
    17:27
    Thank you. A Thank you. But they're extremely sensitive to light. They don't last very long. It's like the old getaway cabinets when you get in that real bright red. Oh, God, it's beautiful for now. But, you know, after a while, it just turns, you start seeing the white behind it again because it was a transparent color and it wasn't light fast. They had to put a white down first and then put the red over the top of it. The red starts being eaten away by the light and then you're left with this little bit of red over white and you get those pink cabinets.
    19:27
    Here's an example of that. So one of the main areas in the lagoon area on Monster Bash is actually a trans, they use a fluorescent ink in there. And you can see exactly where all the lights in around in this, these both had light bulbs up in them. Thank you. A lot of the work we're going to be doing is going to be detail work, so just get used to it. When there's a comparison between some of the cheapo brushes and the really nice liners, the reason their bristles are so long is that you dip it in the paint and you can drag it along the surface and you basically pulling this long bristles along the surface and they kind of make a really nice straight line If you can get to where you have a steady hand you can make some real money A great place to start off your day You keep them pointed. The best, it's kind of gross, I guess, maybe in some people's lives, but the best way to keep them pointed is to lick them. You clean them off, you rinse them really well, get all the paint off them, and then you swirl it on the end of your tongue and you put it away. And the saliva dries and it keeps everything, all the, it keeps your brush from having a bad hair day, basically. You don't want it, bristles going out like that, because every time you try and paint with that, you're getting paint wherever there might be a stray bristle. www.fastpinball.com A little bit of a surprise. A
    23:48
    I'm going to take the last bit of adhesive because adhesive is not too friendly to adhesion either. And then you're going to take like an 800 grit sandpaper. And this is all, when I'm saying surface preparation, I'm going to touch up a play field and I'm going to have it clear coated. So I don't care about scratching the surface anymore. I want to scratch the surface because I need a tooth for the clear coat and my touch up to actually adhere to the play field. So the rough surface is what helps everything, excuse me, attach well.
    24:21
    If you're working in areas like the ball shooter groove, little pieces of EMT, that aluminum electrical pipe, or pieces of PVC in different diameters, roll a piece of sandpaper around them. You can get that black stuff out of there, find the plywood that's underneath all that black stuff in the shooter lane. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Thank you. Wood repair. So we all have these places on play fields where, you know, they get torn up. When you put a metal snubber bracket up here and you start smashing a ball into it with a square or a round or any shape hole around it, it's going to ricochet off that from different angles. It's going to hit. It's going to destroy the wood. You've got areas where the ball has to literally go across a little moat here that goes to the track there. Thank you. I just take a piece and I cut off like a little donut there and it's wrapped in plastic too. It's got a plastic wrapping. You unwrap the plastic and you just start kneading it with your fingers. If you dip your fingers in water and as you're kneading it, it won't stick to your hands and the water doesn't do anything to the putty either. Thank you for watching. Here's another one. Again, even if you're not touching up your play field or clearing it and you notice around some of the holes that you're getting some of that splintering where the wood is getting crushed to the point that the plywood is delaminating and coming off in little flecks, if you'll take some water-thin super glue, you can get that in California, right? Okay, just checking, just checking. Water-thin super glue, you put some of that on there and you'll just, it's amazing. The wood just drinks it in. And when it drinks it in, it's actually gluing all the fibers of the wood back together again. You can just take, if you've got a rubber glove on or you don't mind giving it on your finger, you can just run along a smooth edge and drip some more on there and run along and it'll leave it a nice smooth surface and it'll actually look like it's clear coated when it's done too. And it'll protect, it's either a good starting point for fixing a hole like I'm going to show you here in a second A little bit of it up across the top of the playfield and onto the clear coat and it makes a really good seal to keep things together. So this is an old Batman Forever playfield and these are a couple of holes that I fixed.
    30:49
    I can't help it myself but throw in pin tips whenever I see something like this. This had a small target in there that had been beat to death so much it had bent the bracket of the target and made a chunk out of the wood here. But more importantly, on either side were sleeve posts. And the sleeve posts got loose over time. Everything needs to be kept super tight on a pinball play field. It's getting smashed by a ball every second. And what happens, that's got a threaded hole that goes all the way through the play field and the nut screws on underneath. That gets loose. A
    31:52
    and then redrill holes to put the sleep post back in. So this is my monster bash play field, and I did some work on some damage to the wood. This had a big chunk missing out of the back here from balls being sent up in here at such great speed. And here you see again some of the difference in color here, how it graduates back towards that more yellow-green color that I was talking about earlier, the fluorescence going away. This is after cleaning and even without using fluorescent paint, I got a pretty nice green paint color in there, right? And then I'm able to touch up the black line around that and once I get the quick wood in there, I match a color to the wood grain and I paint in the inside of the holes like that and it completely covers it up. A Mosh Pit Hole Fist, match the purple, do the black around here.
    33:19
    This is after touch-up. So mixing paint. I like to mix a small amount of paint on acetate. Acetate is non-porous, so it's like working on a piece of plastic. You can find it at a garage store, a garage sales.
    33:39
    Old boxes of like view graph material, overhead transparencies. And I just cut me a 4x4 section of it or so. And you put your major component colors up here so that you can just dab a little bit and add it to the mix area. Then you drip, drip, drip a few drops of that milk-like, watery, acrylic airbrush medium in here. And this is where you mix to try and get the final color. And then you dab a little on the area that needs a little more white. You grab a little white and bring it in here and mix it in. A
    34:42
    A Okay, good deal. Yeah, keep forgetting where I'm at here. So yeah, these are nice little, very airtight lids and these nice little size for mixing paints and I'll mix my paint in there and what I like to do is use a folded post-it note to stick to the bottom of that and that allows me to keep my paint from being just this flat, thin puddle on the bottom of the cup which will then dry out quicker. A
    36:09
    A little playfields are made. They're screened in different colors, so there'll be orange all over the playfield. You may just be working in this one little area right now, and you've got to get to orange up there, but you want it to be the same color. You mix enough that you can hold on to and keep the paint for later when you're doing the other areas of the playfield. So it's very cool that way.
    36:33
    That's with the lid on. Again, these snap on. They're really tight, and they do really well. I maintain those with my airbrush medium. So painting tips. I like to use that same acetate. I'll put a piece of that under my hand and use that to keep from getting hand oils and things on the surface that I later have to try and clean again. I have cleaned and prepped this entire play field. I've sanded it. I've wiped it down with naphtha. I've got it all clean. I want to keep it that way. I don't want any oils. I don't want anything on top of it. A little bit of a I use two different cups of water. I find that when you're starting to mix your paint here, you try and reuse these even though I'm pretty cheap. I guess I should just throw it in the trash. But I use this one several times. My first cup of water gets pretty dirty pretty fast. So I keep a secondary one to get the worst off here and then I move to a paper towel and I wipe the brush off and then I move into here to get the rest of it off. A
    38:20
    I bought one of the best purchases I ever made. It's a great big magnifier. They have the little round ones with the fluorescent around them. This is a huge rectangular one. I have it mounted to my bench and I can work on little things like some of my toys and stuff that I'm going to show you here in a minute. It works really well.
    38:40
    I don't have to use those little glasses. Ackerman Pinnacle www.fastpinball.com If you're going to do an area, you know, the size of half a dime or something like that, I just dip my little tiny brush into that. I get a big bunch of paint and I just drop it in the center and then I use the brush to work it out to the edges and find the edges and work all the way around. And if I can, the ideal thing is to cover that whole area and keep the paint wet as I'm doing it, so do it quickly. And then it'll look like it's a little puddle and as it dries, it'll just come down perfectly flat Thank you. And after painting an area, I've used a naphtha rag. It's really cool too because I can see what it's going to look like clear coated. It's all scratched up so everything's muted and scratched and kind of not shiny, not glossy. When you take a wet naphtha rag and go across it, it gets this beautiful gloss on it and it just completely evaporates to nothing over a few seconds. But immediately I can see what this is going to look like when I hit it with clear coat and I know it's going to look good when it's done.
    41:12
    And I actually, another little trick that I learned over time was when I'm painting and I'm trying to get out to the edges of that, every once in a while I'll go a little beyond the edge and there'll be like this little hump. My line looks really nice and smooth, but it has this little hump in it at the end. I take a toothpick and I just kind of work on it with my teeth. I moisten it a little bit and then I run that toothpick, use them just down on the surface. And I work it and I work it and you can kind of push the acrylic paint back into where it needs to be. It works pretty well while it's not wet, but it's not dry either. So you can kind of push it back in, and you can straighten out lines. You can make more smooth curves and do a little touch-up of the touch-up afterwards. It works well.
    41:57
    And again, water-thin superglue is also a word. He's a mylar. They're both good for protecting small touch-up areas, especially if some place of the ball is going to come falling onto, and you're not going to do clear coating. You put a piece of mylar over it. And, you know, sometimes you have to reapply your touch-up if it gets damaged. I noticed when I was doing the feet of my Frankenstein guy on Monster Bash that when he gets hit in the toes, all the black was off of his boots, and I put just black paint on there, and I thought, now this may need to be done again every few weeks or something. It lasted a long time. I was surprised because of the flexibility of the acrylic paint, how long that lasted. It worked really well.
    42:46
    Airbrushing tools. So eventually the idea was to get to where I could do airbrushing because there's so many large areas. I mean, the first play field that I did, and I'm going to show it to you here in more detail, the high-speed play field I did, I did some very painted some very large areas and I did not use an airbrush because I just I wasn comfortable with that yet It was my first touch up I got a bunch of bigger fish to fry than worrying about an airbrush Also I got all the paint you know the clear coating and all the other things the color matching I learning how to do all this stuff I didn need another you know another iron in my fire so I kind of kept that in my back pocket A little bit of a long story. A
    44:27
    We'll be right back. A I'm going to take this and drag it along this black line here and drag it along this white line here and then just peel up the piece in the center there and it would leave the blue. I can spray paint with blue and when I'm done pull the frisket paper off and the white and the black would be protected. Do you use brush with frisket sometimes? You can, yeah. It's just going to keep it from going where you don't want it. So when I'm going to do airbrushing, I've got to mix plenty of paint. So I'm going to mix a big portion of one of those cups because I'm going to take the cup and pour into that little gravity feed thing, and it's going to take a lot of paint. I'm going to use the airbrush medium to thin it. I want it to be like a water consistency. Now I want it to go on really thin. I'm going to airbrush slowly in thin overlapping coats. You don't want to spray and hold it in one spot and just watch it build up. You're basically just trying to dust, dust, dust, dust, get back over it again. And you're going to feather if you're not covering an entire area. If you're going to the outer edge, just try and feather up, even against the frisket paper, try and feather up against it so it doesn't build up. And you want to remove that frisket paper immediately after painting. A
    48:40
    A I worked on it. I'm going to talk about it in detail here in a minute. But I took the space shuttle toy. This is the original space shuttle toy on my game. And these are the original decals. You can see they were starting to come up and all that. I took all of these decals off, peeled them off because they're made of vinyl and they were good quality back in the day. And they still had good color and all that. I took them and I turned them over on my bench and I took a NAFTA rag and I got all of the, using my thumbnail and the NAFTA, I was able to get all of the adhesive stuff off the back. Thank you. A
    50:40
    A I was able to take an X-Acto knife and start under a corner here without damaging a corner and move it slowly, take it slowly up. And so my space shuttle came out really nice.
    51:27
    And these are all original decals. Just cleaned them up, reapplied them on top of paint. I painted the tip of the nose of it gray. A. I thought when I bought, you know, this is a long time ago when I bought my Monster Bash, I always thought my Dracula guy's feet were broken because he had like square toes. And I thought, how did they break the toes off of Dracula? So I tried to get me another Dracula and I paid 40 bucks for this thing back in the day. I bet they're probably 150 now. And I get it in and I'm like, my goodness, what in the heck happened here? This looks like it was painted by a blind four-year-old. One of the things that I always do in pinball is when I look at something and I'm like, am I going to tackle this? This is part of that intestinal fortitudes part I was telling you about. I look at it and I'm like, if I do this, can I make it look better than it currently does? Hell yeah, I can. So this is what I did. Took this guy, I added some more detail to him, made him a black bow tie, you know, did the buttons on his shirt, his cuff links. And I literally repainted all of the red, every bit of the red. And I used that Acura, which is like a blood red. It's really, really great. And I repainted all the black also because I wanted it to be a consistent color and thing all around him like that. So this is from above. You can see I even added little dots for the highlights. Like he's got a shiny amulet on there and a shiny ring. This is my Igor guy. I went in with a fine X-Acto knife, and of course when they spray painted him originally with this silver color, they over-sprayed all over the place. It had halfway up his arm, down on his chest, and all these areas in the center were all filled in with silver. And I just took and scraped it all off, got the old paint off. I bought some silver acrylic paint, and I repainted the whole things, I'm a big fan of the movie.
    53:59
    This is all black back behind here and white in the front. You're constantly going back and forth touching up. I add the white and I get a little where the black's supposed to be. Then I come in with the black and I try to leave a final line. Oop, I got a little black where the white is supposed to be. And you're like constantly coming back with the opposite color paint and trying to fix it. But if you get something that's messed up, I just take a wet Q-tip and twist it in there and all the paint comes right out and you start over again. So you do it until it looks like it should. This is... Thank you. And then, of course, a ton of work on his hair, his Gary Stern hair and his face there. So, yeah, that was pretty good.
    55:37
    Other opportunities for touch-up? You got on your cabinets, the corners get screwed up, the edges get screwed up. Mars Black works really well for that inside cabinets where you get those arcs from the Williams thing where somebody didn't get one locked in and they made this big arc in there, these little scratches. Thank you. A little bit different color there. That's what the original color was. This is how it looks over time. And I just kind of matched one or the other and went with it. So I did this. Thank you. Now on the play field it looked really good.
    57:20
    Screen play field plastics. Now you can fix those pretty easily. They're pretty common type colors. There's not a lot of mixing required. They're very primary basic kind of colors. You can touch off where some of the screw heads have rubbed the paint off the underside of your plastics. Thank you. A
    58:41
    A little bit of a twist. I'm going to go back to the I'm going to go ahead and show you a little bit of the
    59:57
    Thank you. I did not do the entire thing and you can't tell where it started and ended. That one I did. That right there, I wanted to know what that bush was supposed to look like and I tried to recreate that as best I could because a lot of it was missing. And yes, anywhere there's areas like that where there's no paint, yeah, you definitely want to look and see what it's supposed to look like. Thank you. This is after touching up and this is after clear coating. So again you see how much the clear coating helps everything blend together and look a lot nicer. This is F14 Tomcat. So this is an interesting case because you've got Mylar circle here, you've got Mylar up above here and for some brilliant reason they left this opening in here. So this got all messed up and I had to match that blue perfectly in order to make that arc go away. with clear coat it looks even better. No, they are not.
    61:59
    I peeled them up. It's in my name. Yeah, I peeled them. Yeah, but you know what? I'm going to touch up that area. If it pulls some of the wood off, yeah, I got this. I'm going to fix it. So there's that reassurance. You can see down below here, I get to repaint all the explosions and stuff and just kind of let myself go wild. Now my explosions on my F-14 are unique. They're not even... That's just how you have to look at it. That's after clear coating. Oh, this is... Everybody knows F-14 is insert hell. I mean, you leave in so little wood in between all of these inserts. Every one of these guys had to be completely repainted around. Thank you. I'm a big fan of the Thank you. A
    64:33
    I'm going to show you a picture of the first time I did airbrushing All of the stuff around it Now my space shuttle This is an eBay description for my space shuttle It really said these things It spent most of its life in a convenience store This guy's like, I'm not talking about a typical shop dive. You're going to need to do a serious top with touch-up, elbow grease, sweat. And he says, the good thing is it's got fantastic back glass. And he didn't lie. That was great. So I move on to the next page. And he says, oh, it works perfectly except the drop target won't set in the middle. Thank you for watching. A little bit of talent in a few hours. I ended up spending a year on the cabinet on this and a year on the play field. So it was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. This was the side of my machine, the side of the back box. This is after I used rattle cans and masking tape to do the stripes and painted it all up. I made my own stencils, and I made it match what was on the cabinet. Cut them out myself. This is in the back box. Thank you. I did put a new piece of fabric in the speaker panel. My insert door, spray painted that all white again, put two good displays back in there. Care to guess which side of the cabinet was facing the window in the convenience store? Yeah, that one. So yeah, I'm tracing this stuff as best I can. But, you know, it's a mirror image on the opposite side and it was only about half as bad over there. But that's after doing it. This is the opposite side. This is the good side. So, yeah.
    67:52
    I still have those, believe it or not. You must know me. I never throw anything away. Like I was telling him, I laid them on the cabinet. I got them all centered out the way I wanted them. And I took some big bolts and nuts and things and laid them on top of there to hold it down. And as I painted, you have to make a stencil for each color, right? You have to do the white, the red.
    68:18
    So on this back here, there was a red stencil, a white stencil that I then used, and maybe even in a couple of different places, like just doing this one separately or something like that. I think I made it pretty much all the same, though, but red and white stripes I all did with masking tape. They forgot to mention in the eBay description that they almost pulled a half-inch washer through the front of the machine trying to get them quarters inside there. I mean, just absolutely ripped almost a complete hole in that side of it. So I fixed all that up. The one thing I did replace on the game was the coin door metal piece right there because it was so banged up and clinked. And I'm like, I'm not a body specialist. I'm a special auto body specialist, so I replaced that one thing, but all the rest of the parts inside I kept, and I cleaned, and I shined, and I polished, and I don't even want to talk about what that stuff was, but once it's gone it looks pretty damn good. Thank you. A
    70:17
    Thank you. I'm pinning your ears back and doing it. Red, orange, yellow's been added there. Bring the black in, touch up. I did not paint the entire blue. I touched it up and matched the color that was there. Made me some letters that were all screwed up. That was my first lettering fun. And that's after touch up. That's after clear coat. This area, really bad. I'm like, holy crap, that's a lot of letters missing right there. Cleaned it up, it looks even worse. Start in with tan down in here. First thing I wanted to do is use some, I think I used JB Weld on this. The gray kind of gives it away. But this is how green I was in pinball. I didn't realize that they make those little things in there at the factory, those little dents in there. I thought it had been done by damage. Thank you. I'm going to go ahead and get my red involved now, fix the white lettering that was completely gone in the center there, bring those up, do some more of this, add some black around those and fix and keep stepping back a little further. This is after all the touch-ups. This is after clear coating. And I actually did repaint the USA even so that I have really white and really opaque USA inserts right there. This part was, this is where I said, I'm either going to learn how to do this or it's going to be over. You know, you're just going to have to sit in a corner in a fetal position and cry. Because this isn't really all that bad for a space shuttle, quite frankly. But all of these circles, concentric circles, circles within circles, arcs of circles, black and green between circles of blue and red and orange. And, oh, by the way, there's lettering and numbering on all of these things, too. It's all gone. Start with my gray, start bringing in some of the other colors, red a little, and it looks like hell. You've got to make it look worse before you can make it look better because all the blue starts coming in, starts looking all mushed together. Now some orange, then let's add the white and the blacks and everything and finish it up. That's after touch-up, that's after clear coating.
    73:23
    And if anything could get worse, it got worse. This area, the badge, I had to ask, you know, you never ask when you say, oh my God, can it get any worse? Well, I was thinking that when I did all the circles. It can get worse. There's these things called stars. I'm like, Indiana Jones, why do you have to be stars? But it's got stars in there.
    73:46
    Red, start fixing some of the lettering. Whites and blues and all these things. I get to this point and everything's done except for the stars. A
    74:26
    A I'm a big fan of the I've never seen that work. And it really meant a lot. So, any more questions?
    75:30
    He raised his hand. You wait. The way they did it and the way we have to recreate it always turns into two different processes because they were doing things on a massive scale A
    76:21
    I touched up my cabinet. I didn't re-stencil it. And when I got to the coin door, I noticed it had texture on it. It looked like it had spatters of paint. You know, it was like a textured paint in there. And I did do what you're talking about. I took and, you know, used a toothbrush. I put some on my fingers and just splattered it around. And then I painted it over the top of it, and it pretty well matched the places where the paint had all taken off. You're talking about like on old Gottliebs, right? The wedge heads and stuff where they did that on all the games?
    77:00
    Yep, spraying everything and anybody that walked in front of them and 10 feet behind them and everything else. Yeah, I really, I'd have to sit and think about that and try some things, I guess. But I have never, the one play field or one cabinet that I fixed up was an old flying carpet. Thank you for watching. I don't know if that answers your question or not.
    77:55
    I never answer everything as short. I'm sorry, you had something over here real quick? Over the clear coat? So all of this stuff was done over the clear coat because all I did was sand the clear coat except for areas where there was no paint or anything. Obviously it was gone. On that space shuttle I'm going over varnish and things like that I think it was a game where they had to add polyurethane, probably what they used in those days. But then the clear coat comes over the top of it. Between my acrylic painting and the new clear coat, everything comes out smooth.
    78:30
    It does continue to suck down the clear coat, and you can see a little more texture in it over time. But that space shuttle game, we had the New Mexico State Pinball Championships at my home, and that was one of the games that was in the championships. Thank you. What's that?
    79:11
    Yes, yes. Again, surface preparation, surface preparation, surface preparation. Get all the oils off and get all the adhesives off of it.
    79:20
    NAFTA, right before you put any sticker on, before you put any paint on, is the best thing in the world for that to clear it up and get it ready. Sir?
    79:34
    Officer, arrest this man. Obviously a smuggler of NAFTA. Yes, sir. Do you use like a water basin there? Do you put it onto the airplane?
    79:49
    I, there, you got me on that one because I did not clear coat my play field. I took it to somebody who knows. One of my favorite things to say in pinball also is know your limitations. I'm not a clear coater. I don't have a paint booth. I don't have the facilities for that. Professionals do this stuff all day long. And I took it to a guy that does car stuff. And on my first couple of play fields, they put way too much clear on and sanded off. And sometimes some of my higher touch-ups got sanded off in between clear coats. So that was kind of a bummer too. My funhouse one, I've got a list of things that if I were to go back and do it again, Thank you for watching. Thank you. I'm going to stop, sand it in a little bit in between and put another pool line until it actually physically had a dome to it and dried and let it dry really good and then I block sanded it down with the whole area around it and got it toothed up for spraying it and I used spray can water based polyurethane to cover the entire play field and it still looks good. I still have that barricora. So, very cool. Sir?
    81:59
    Yeah, I mean, if it's a small enough area, back glasses have two areas to them. There are some that are translucent and others that are intentionally opaque, A
    82:59
    I'm happy with that. Do you have a Fri-A water-type decal? They apply them over the inserts to recreate all of the insert writing and all that. You can clear coat over the top of those and make sure they adhere really well to the play field.
    84:00
    People that talk about using squeegees and water on cabinet decals and stuff like that, that does not make sense to me.
    84:10
    It seems like anything I'm trying to do to make those decals stick to the cabinet, I'm going to screw up by getting them wet. And there's no way you're going to get it all out of there. I'd rather have an air bubble under there than water under there or damage something else. I never subscribed to that theory. Line it up, check it, test it, check it again, check it, check it 20 times, and then actually pull the backing off and hold it in place and get a couple of people to help you. It's not worth spraying Windex on there. It makes my head hurt. Thank you. You're working on electromechanical games.
    85:18
    Tomorrow, come back to check out. Butch will be doing a seminar with me again, owning your first pinball machine. So I know y'all all in here are in the advanced class, but if you have any friends that are on the border of maybe making that first purchase for their pinball, send them to our class tomorrow at 11. We do the super basics like how to take the play field glass off, you know, how to add credits to your games. Simple stuff that will just help them become a little bit more confident in making their first pinball purchase. You know, it's a big leap to that. So we have that novice class. And then after that at 1230, we have the Sunday school, which we're going to break everyone off into smaller groups. Butch will be one of the teachers. Thank you for watching.