|
|
|
|
|
The only major hassle on this playfield when I got it, apart from the fact it was filthy, was that it had one broken plastic, it was the one in the upper left hand corner that surrounded the left ramp and also covered the area where the balls get locked in for Multi-Ball, apparently this plastic breaks a lot on this machine as the balls hit it as they get thrown out of the Multi-Ball trough. This machine had also had a piece of meshed metal mounted under the broken plastic ( a good idea, however this one was not the same shape as the plastic and hung out a bit more than it should have ).
So I started to surf the web to look for any info on re-creating these parts and I found a couple of sites with a lot of information about re-creating playfield plastics, you can to those sites via my links page or click here or here. To re-create this BK plastic I simply FOLLOWED THE INSTRUCTIONS on the web sites that I explained how to fix these plastics. I also grabbed the original flat piece of meshed metal that someone had stuck in this machine and used a Dremel tool to cut it to the same shape as the plastic and place it under the plastic above the ball lock trough so that this plastic should never break again. Here is a brief rundown on the process I followed - I bought a small sheet of 3mm perspex and cut it to the shape of the broken part, to do this I used a jigsaw with a "thin-cut" blade, I did it slowly and I left the backing paper on the perspex so that the bottom plate of the jigsaw did not scratch the perspex. I then scanned the original image from the broken plastic at 300dpi into my PC and touched up the colours and re-created the missing parts in Photoshop, then I bought some transparent inkjet papers and printed the scanned image IN REVERSE onto the transparent paper which gave me a sticker that I could stick on the perspex from underneath. After that , all that was left to do was to get some normal white sticky-backed PC paper and stick it under my image to diffuse the light coming from the globes once this piece was installed on the playfield. It all took about a day of mucking around but it came out real nice, and after all that I discovered that Action Pinball now sells a replica of this exact part !! ( and some other really nice parts for The Black Knight ), anyway the shot below shows how mine turned out.
You can also see how the mesh under the plastic no longer sticks out but it actually is still in place to protect this commonly broken Black Knight plastic. The pop Bumper needed some attention as well so I picked up a perfect repro from Ray at Action Pinball and the end result can be seen below. I am unsure if Ray still has them in stock .
My next Playfield page for the Black Knight has images of the drop targets, ramps and general Black Knight Playfield shots after cleaning it up.
|
