SUPERMAN
LAST UPDATED 18 APRIL '06
Atari had a fairly short life in the pinball arena, from about 1976 to 1983. They made about 11 machines, with Superman probably being the most popular. The owner responded to an ad, he gave me an honest assessment over the phone - not working, in poor condition.
I dropped in to have a look. Backglass was faded and flaking badly, cabinet had been repainted by hand destroying much of the artwork, flippers had been "modified", most metal trim was rusted and it would only light up when turned on. He had tried fixing it many times with no luck.
I nearly walked away but made a throwaway offer of $200AU ($150US), he accepted and it found a new home. Within 2 hours of getting it home it was up and running, a combination of blown fuses, cracked fuse holder and loose wiring in the coin door.
Click on images for larger view
While it "worked", it only just worked. Flippers would flutter and only hit the ball about halfway up the playfield. WHile tinkering I blew the flipper relay. No more flippers! And what do you use when you have no flipper rubbers? Easy, the prior owner just used elastoplast ankle strapping!! (pic taken after I started mylar removal)
The relay was an obscure American Zettler type, hard to obtain (top left). Several standard R10 relays were equivalents though, both pruchased from Mouser Electronics. One is a 2 Amp (bottom), the other a 5 Amp (top right), both work fine. Links and coil sleeves were replaced on the flippers. Links were worn badly. Flippers then worked 100%.
The first two pics of the backglass are a composite of scans using a HP 4670. It has no plastic "lip" on the face plate, allowing it to be flush with the backglass while scanning. The glass was badly faded and flaked. The brown/woodgrain you can see through the glass is the top of my desk that I scanned it on, just to give an idea of how much paint was missing. Most of the white areas are actually meant to be red, the same as the Superman logo, it should be a red "S". Red often fades to yellow/white with heavy sun exposure.
The third pic is of the backglass after Photoshopping. It has a "smoother", more "cartoonish" finish than the original, this is simply my personal preference and an attempt to limit the time spent on retouching it. When I have a backglass printed, it is a multi layer process.
See the BACKGLASS SCANNING section for more info.
Playfield mylar had to be removed. Virtually all inserts had lifted through the mylar, breaking it. There were several areas of bubbling mylar as well. The inserts were so warped that when a ruler was place across their surface, they dipped in the middle anywhere between 2mm - 4mm (1/16" - 1/8"). Hair dryer technique was used to remove the mylar.
Mylar removal and cleaning the glue from them with glue remover damaged the ink on many inserts, requiring new decals to be made up in Illustrator. Only 1 or 2 inserts were worked on with glue remover at a time. On some it removed the ink almost instantly, others it had no effect. Totally weird! Perhaps different ink batches were used for different letters, who knows. Fonts were found on the 'net to match those on the inserts as closely as possible. I used "CNN" and "Atarian".
When the mylar was removed, almost all the glue stayed on the playfield. Various glue removers were tried but the best was "Oompf", available at Woolworths and BigW.
WARNING - TRY THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK, RESULTS MAY VARY
I sprayed a small area, about 20cm x 20cm, placed glad wrap over the top. Leave 5 minutes, remove glad wrap and repeat, replacing the glad wrap. I then used the edge of a credit card to scrape the glue off. Don't press too hard or you may damage the playfield.
The cabinet had been repainted at some stage by a complete fool. Stand closer than 6 feet and it looks like junior primary kids have taken to it. Basically it was a matter of "slap it on, overpaint here, miss something there". It is a dog's breakfast and the cabinet will have to be stencilled and repainted.
In a last ditch attempt to save the artwork I managed to take most of the repaint off but the original artwork underneath was in very poor condition. Looks sort of OK if you step away but closer than a few feet and it is terrible. "Friskit" (low tack clear tracing mylar) is placed over the artwork and traced. Tracing will be touched up several times until it is good and any errors are removed in the tracing.
Thanks to several people on rec.games.pinball who sent me clear pics of good cabinet artwork, I was able to reproduce the head sideart. Print it up on a printer (economy mode), join together, place the "Friskit" over it and trace away. Quite easy for the head as the artwork is almost all angles except the "S" logo. This was then transferred to thick cardstock, about 500GSM. Thinner cardstock will almost surely bend/curl when the paint is applied, the thicker cardstock resists this well and allows the stencils to be used again to complete the other side of the cabinet and head.
When the friskit was removed from the body of the cab, most of the original paint came with it due to the deterioration of the paint as can be seen in the flying superman pic. A separate stencil is needed for each color to be sprayed. For Superman the base is white, followed by red and finally blue.
Decals return from the printers, including the center "building plastic" on top of the drop targets. This plastic takes a hammering and is almost always cracked/broken as mine was. Inserts were then sanded clean of all ink, with 800, 1200, 2000 grit wet/dry then polished with Novus 2. Inserts placed back into their holes and glued with superglue once levelled and the new decal placed over the top.
**********************NEW STUFF FROM PC FILE HERE********************
All paints used on the cabinet are enamels. Cabinet is sprayed with a base coat of white. Two coats are required, each sprayed a day apart. Due to the large area of coverage I used a large spray gun. Messy, requiring lots of clean up.
Second stencil used is to put down one coat of red enamel. I was lucky enough to buy a used Testors Aztek A320 airbrush set on eBay Australia for $20. Came with a medium nozzle (purple). I went out and bought a large coverage nozzle as well (yellow). Spraying the entire side in red only took about 10 minutes, I could do it in the shed and there is very little cleanup of the equipment afterwards. If you are going to restencil a cabinet, an airbrush is certainly the way to go.
I put to much spray on contact on the cardboard stencil to spray the blue and did not allow it to dry long enough prior to placing it on the cabinet. Some of it stuck and required removal with glue remover. Stencil will now have to be repaired prior to reversing it and doing the left side of the cabinet.
Right side of cabinet about 90% done (still showing the stencil stuck down). Colours are a good match
and is looking good.
STILL TO BE ADDED - TOUCHUPS, PAINTS, ADDING MYLAR ETC
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