Electrophoresis? General 'bit' prep during restoration

[VeeMonroe]

I'm posting this here for advice from people who aren't following my Alien Poker shop log. I've got a shedload of big 'bits' that have come off Alien Poker (plus a load of bags of screws, etc.). They're rusty, but also generically 'tarnished'.

I've got a tumbler and an ultrasonic bath, but these pieces are too big to fit in there. I also have a long tube for removing rust with evaporust, but that won't remove the tarnish. So, I don't know if I should send them off somewhere and have them recoated, or similar. Do I get them plated (e.g. Douglas Plating https://douglas-plating.co.uk), or what?

And, also, for future reference, what do I do with mechs for when I strip the bottom of the playfield? Everything is currently in little labelled bags, but I don't know how you keep everything together/remember what goes where if you send them off.

 

[paulg100]

personally id just polish em up on the lathe with autosol, any stubborn spots just go over them with something like 600-800grit wet first. Zero cost and will look lovely.
(if you dont have a polishing lathe can just buy a mop attachment for a drill)

If your flush then chrome them, have you seen the price of chrome now days?, just the handle on my fish tails was near £200 after postage.

Bascially money youll never get back.

 

[VeeMonroe]

personally id just polish em up on the lathe with autosol, any stubborn spots just go over them with something like 600-800grit wet first. Zero cost and will look lovely.

I don't have a lathe All work is being done in my bedroom and in our (literally bike-sized) conservatory!! I'd have to hand polish everything with a Dremel and my experience so far is that it still leaves discoloured patches where the original coating has come off (?)

If your flush then chrome them, have you seen the price of chrome now days?, just the handle on my fish tails was near £200 after postage.

Bascially money youll never get back.

I'm never getting any money back on this thing TBH It's an Alien Poker, a single ball game with bats**t art rated #185 on the Pinside Top 100 I've already spent £695 on a new playfield and, including parts and paint, I've now probably spent more doing it up than I spent on buying it!!!

My reasoning was that, if I s**tted up the restoration job so badly that I had to throw it in a skip, it wasn't going to lose me £1,000s but, obviously, the hope is that I can do it up nicely and maybe give it some new code somewhere further along the line (but, even then, the paying audience for Alien Poker: Galactic Tour Edition is going to be small!!)

 

[paulg100]

no not with a dremel, youll be there all day .

Drill attachment or angle grinder attachment. Youve got cotton flap mops, polishing mops. Will get those bits up nice in no time. Maybe £15 for a couple.

Obviously if you want "high end" then machine polished, electroplated, powder coated or chromed but as you say your throwing money into a pit.

Amazon.co.uk : drill flap mop

 

[AlanJ]

Just do your best, where the nickel plating has come off, you are never going to get it back. So just clean and polish.

 

[VeeMonroe]

Just do your best, where the nickel plating has come off, you are never going to get it back. So just clean and polish.

Thanks. Yes, this is basically where I've got the issue. So, what I've done up to now is that I spent AGES (and ages and ages) Dremelling and Autosol-ing various bits from the playfield. Some of them are okay, but some of them are like the flap pictured. I've spent ages cleaning it, but the ball bouncing off the metal has knocked a hole in the coating and I've got no way of making it shiny again. I can't easily buy a replacement either because Alien Poker has f**k-all part numbers listed in the manual, so I'd have to spend ages manually searching for it.


The things that were originally zinc coated, I've been zinc coating with a can of zinc spray I bought from Toolstation and that generally looks quite good. But, it doesn't work for the shiny stuff. But I'm thinking that, if I box everything shiny up and send it off for coating, I'm going to end up with a box of hundreds of unsorted parts that I've no idea what they are anymore. And I'm not sure how people handle that...

Also, with the mechs, it's not just a cosmetic issue. If I start spraying zinc all over mechs that have forty years of wear, I'm shining stuff that's still potentially got metal fatigue. So, I'm not sure what to replace!!

 

[Fantazia2]

Get several pieces of paper, right the part name/location on the paper, put it next to the part and then take a photo of it. Rinse and Repeat.

If sending small parts off for plating etc, take a picture of them all together and make sure you get them all back afterwards, its easy for small pieces to go missing.