Just another WordPress site
Thanks to a very good guy I got in contact through https://pinside.com/ I have new larger images of not only the front of the glass, but the masking on the back too. Posting them here for others to find as well (images should link to the larger files, under 2Mb each). I hope to be back to this project soon.
The game had trouble ejecting the ball, maybe the solenoid is loose. So lets pop the top.
Well, it was loose, but the bigger issue is the rails are below those tabs. Loosen up the screws and lifted the rails over those tabs and it ejects every time now.
The new rubber is white, part of a $35 “tune up kit”. I think they look good and it plays much better =)
The Play field needs some cleanup, but is in good shape.
All the rubber needs to be replaced. There is a little flaking near the bumpers.
There is a little rust in the ball captures and the lower part of one of the bumpers is chipped, but works.
The center Speakeasy artwork piece is cracked and the blue flowery piece at the top of the playfield is completely gone.
But a magic eraser does wonders on the white plastic pieces. The left side flipper is scraping a little bit.
The Backglass of this pinball machine is supposed to look like this:
But mine looks like this against a yellow poster board, and after a little cleanup in GIMP (images link to xcf files, 919MB and 96MB currently ).
Way too much of the artwork is missing for my original plan. From reading other forums it sounded plausible to use water transfer decals to fill in the missing pieces. But the local printshop convinced me that the ink itself would cause uneven shrinking of the transfer medium and be difficult to match up at this scale.
So I’m going to clean up the scan as best I can and sent it and the glass to BGResto.com I have not tried to correct the colors. I converted the above image from RGB mode to indexed. That alone made it a lot smaller. Once I get the colors in the palette below 16 I’ll copy the RBG values from reference pictures over.
As for the cleanup, I’m torn. Since the glass was originally made with a silkscreen process the individual color layers do not always line up. The numbers above the player scores and bottles behind the bar are good examples. I’m sure the original was perfect, but i kind of like the flaws in the process. So what to do…..
Well, I managed to break wordpress and had to start over. Luckily I did not have very much content and I can hopefully build it back soon.
Live and learn….
Back in march 2009 I ordered the paper plans for an arcade cabinet, a 27″ arcade monitor and 4 sheets of MDF plywood. When the rain calmed down construction started in April:
So now lets buy a computer to run it, 2 joysticks, keyboard encoder, trackball, spinner, mouse encoder and 24 buttons. When June came around, I had something playable:
That was the worst mistake, Once it became playable things slowed down a lot.
7 years later, Still no artwork on the poor thing. My idea of a mosaic of Dirk the Daring made out of images from other video games did not look good unless you were really far away. Then Madeline wanted nothing to do with the idea of her in the middle with a karate gi surrounded by classic fighter characters 🙁 So here it sits. Played occasionally, but longing to be complete. This is why I’m starting with the backglass of the pinball. But its already playable too……
My wife bought me a toy for fathers day. It is a 1977 Playmatic 4-Player Speakeasy EM Pinball.
I really like this machine, The playfield is in good condition and is kind of simple. But for a machine built when I was 7 I like that you can trigger the reels on the backglass slot machine to possibly win free games.
The EM is “Electrical Mechanical”. Which means there is all sorts of fun under the hood
Information on this model can be found at http://www.ipdb.org/machine.cgi?id=2269 I’ll add additional posts over time about the condition of the machine and the work put in to it to restore.