Advice on Touching up 3 colour classic Bally cabinets

[DRD]

Normally, I leave cabinets alone. But when I look at my Fathom, I do wonder about touching it up. Full stencil sets are available but I am not inclined to buy one as

1. I have read that the cross hatching is very difficult to get right
2. The stencil sets you can buy have errors on the mermaid's tail
3. It is hard to find anyone who has stencilled a game from whom you can gain real world experience
4. If you mess up alignment, you might need to buy a second stencil set!
5. My cabinet has not been bashed. Minor dings can be easily filled.
6. The paint I have has not faded, in stark contrast to a my paragon where blood red is now Barbie pink
7. The money I would spend on stencils would buy me an air brush kit for life

As per the pics, most of the nastiness is dirt and paint showing through the grain on the base coat of dark blue. The areas where there are the other colours have fared much better.

I thus propose to use frisket as a mask. Exacto blades to cut it. Airbrush to touch up the paint I have. These things were crudely sprayed and never perfect, so providing I get the colours right I am quite relaxed about the end result. I imagine that I would need to mix my own colours to get the three shades right

Do people have views, experience of this ?

What paint to you buy that works best on old cabinets please ? Can you get other folk to accurately mix this sort of paint ? Or do you do it yourself

Thank you

 

[ronsplooter]

As your not going for a full re-stencil I'd be tempted to leave it alone and let it show it's scars. Give the cab a clean with IPA and a magic eraser to get rid of the crap and that will probably make it look better. I used frisket for parts of my FG cab restore and tbh it was a ball ache. When I do my Fathom and Fireball I'll be going down the stencil route

If you do want to go with the touch ups then getting the colour match is key. As long as you can get that then whether you airbrush or use a normal brush won't make too much difference. I'd suggest giving the cab a few coats of clear once you've done the touch ups as this helps give a uniform look and blend in your work. For paint I used rattle cans of car paint from Halfrauds on my FG

 

[kevlar]

I have a roll of frisket that's going to be used to mask/repaint the red on my BSD, probably in the next couple of weeks. I'll post on here how it went.

 

[Nedreud]

I have a roll of Frisket that's going to be used to mask/repaint the red on my BSD, probably in the next couple of weeks. I'll post on here how it went.

Looking forward to seeing that! I'm having exactly the same dilemma with PARAGON and GOLD BALL. There aren't any stencils for GB, so that option is a non-starter from the word go. So I'm looking at either DIY stencil or Frisket. The advantage of a stencil is that it can be used to do both sides (FATHOM maybe not be a mirror image due to the lettering?) whereas Frisket will need to need hand cut for each side.

This conversation keeps coming up again and again! I'm tempted to just buy a vinyl plotter/cutter off eBay and big roll of airbrush vinyl for stencils...

 

[ronsplooter]

If stencil's are available for your game and you're planning on doing a full cabinet restore then my advice is definitely buy them. I didn't do this for FG thinking I could save myself some cash and do it with frisket but the amount of extra time it took wasn't worth it. I will always get stencils from now on if they're available

 

[DRD]

@ronsplooter - when are you planning to stencil fathom pls ? I might wait to see how you get on. Not sure how fussy you are but look at the mermaid's tails on the stencils!!!

I do think that there is a critical difference between fathom and the other three games though- paragon, gold ball and flash Gordon

With fathom the issue is paint loss, not repainting to cover up faded paint. So provided I get the right colours I do not need to do precise frisket lines. All the edges are blurry due to the crude air brush job with the original brass stencils. So I do not need to accurately go up to where the different colours meet

With paragon, Flash Gordon and gold ball the main issue is rich red paint becoming Barbie pink. So you need to recolour the faded red and either extend the areas of red to make sure you cover all the pink in the join areas, of extend the other colours over the pink. So I would completely agree with @ronsplooter on the stencils for these games

 

[Poibug]

I would leave alone or do a full resto with stensils

In between job will look just that IMO

Anyway-it's there to be played-good game