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I LOVE restoring pinball playfields, if you spend about a week on them and if you do it correctly you will see an UNBELEIVABLE difference when you have finished. Apart from the backglass , the playfield is the part of the machine that is most often looked at so it should be 100% at all times, I have seen some ridiculously ugly playfields come up to a near new state. The playfield on this Gorgar was actually in pretty good shape, there were a few fine cracks in the mylar around the centre of the playfield and I considered removing the mylar, but decided against it. So as usual I stripped the entire playfield, cleaned and polished all the metal parts, flattened the warped plastics, used Novus 1, 2, and 3 treatment on the playfield, reproduced the target stickers and spinner sticker as well as the stationary target images. I even replace all the visible playfield screws that hold plastics down with brand new stainless steel screws and replace all the little white acorn nuts that hold playfield plastics on as well, I know it may seem over the top but it is worth it in the end. Once again the Black Sharpie pen came in handy around the playfield inserts. I needed 2 of the playfield plastics replaced so I placed an ad on Mr Pinball Classifieds and a guy from Texas USA supplied me with the pieces that I required, I also replaced the A-B-C rollover lane guides with brand new parts and re-rubbered and re-globed the entire machine. There is an extremely helpful community of pinball people on the Internet.
I did not take a lot of shots of the Gorgar playfield before it was restored as back then I had a crappy digital camera and I didn't think I would build a web site one day so I had no need to- anyway, below is some shots of various parts of the playfield after I restored it. I grabbed new images of the Gorgar spinner from the Pinball Spinner site and I printed them to size on gloss photo paper and then covered them in clear contact paper, I also re-sprayed the actual spinner yellow as it was all chipped around the sides back to metal.
I have used the black Sharpie texta pen to go around the inserts and also to colour the edges of the mylar where you could see it running across the black section above the GAR letters. I polished the chrome side rails in the eject hole passage with Autosol cream polish to give them that mirror finish. I also re-sprayed the ball stopper with a chrome paint as a bit of an experiment, it is OK but has started to come off a little if you have a close look.
The only part of the playfield that has any wear to it is where the Mylar is starting to crack around some of the bonus score inserts. If you look closely you will see it around the 3, 8 and the 20 inserts and also to the right of the dudes head with the blue helmet on. Other than that, the surface of this Gorgar playfield is absolutely perfect. Is she really sniffing under his arm?
I made up new "covers" for the 4 stationary targets around the playfield . I grabbed the images from Phil's Firepower Site and put the red target images from Firepower into Photoshop and simply coloured the red rings blue, I then cut them out and put clear contact on them for protection and glued them over the original target, if I didn't tell you that you would never be able to pick it. Whenever I do any new images I actually stick the contact paper over the image before I cut it to shape which means I only have to do one cut.
The bumper caps were polished using Novus 2 and then Novus 1, I am always very careful not to rub too hard on the old images as the polish can remove some of the images or at least the colour from them so I generally just painstakingly do all the white area's of the caps and then touch up any coloured area's with matching coloured paints. I also install new stainless screws to hold the caps on as most of these old pins have screws that are just basically rust coloured. The target images wered re-done the same as my spinner image and have been installed for over a year now without getting a mark on them.
Until the ownership rights for Williams Bally go to someone who actually gives a fuck about pinball restorers and this hobby, please don't ask me for any images of the spinner or targets from this machine
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