1980 Stern Flight 2000 - Complete Playfield Restoration - For Sale or Trade

 I purchased a Flight 2000 from a guy in Oklahoma and had it shipped to me using Fastenal. Fastenal was great, but the machine was in much rougher shape than I thought from the pictures. I'll document my adventure in another post, but I decided in the end to part out the machine to try to recoop my investment. 

Part of that process was the possibility of selling a restored playfield to someone who had a pretty rough playfield. No one is making new playfields and a Hardtop is not in the plans. I enjoy completely restoring playfields, but this one wasn't as geometric as the others. It was a pretty involved process. 

I'll document the work I did here with lots of pictures. In the end, it turned out well. If no one needs it, I'll hang it on the wall in my arcade. 

Here are pics of the original playfield. I have stripped everything off of the top and bottom since I will only be selling the playfield. I'll sell other parts or keep the other parts for other projects. 

 The paint on the playfield is very fragile. You can see places where it is flaking away. There are also a lot of heavy wear spots. Touching up this much damage has pretty spotty results.

 Here is where the damage is the heaviest. Someone painted over the bare wood with some non-matching green paint to cover the damage. It looks pretty terrible.

 Here is the back. Cleaned off. No wires staples, components. Ready for repainting if someone wants that.

 Here is the playfield sanded down. I love the look of playfields sanded down. They look so clean and simple with the bright colors of the inserts and the grain of the wood.

 Here I have sprayed Varathane clear gloss on the playfield to seal the wood before painting.

 You can see it does add some color to the wood. I'm okay with this. Others prefer 2 part autoclear. I don't really want to mess with something so toxic. I'm sure the people who spray it are plenty safe in their hazmat suits, but it isn't worth it to me.

 I prefer to use Frog Tape instead of frisket. It produces much cleaner lines for me. I have taped everthing off for a black base. I try to start with the darkest colors and move to the lighter colors.

 Here is my first mistake. I taped off some approximate sections to paint the blue and purple knowing I would touch it up later. The tape lines and cuts from the exacto knife were visible later. I regret not just painting these colors by hand. My airbrush wasn't very precise. I thought at first I would just spray with out tape and keep the overlap for effect, but the overspray was much to big and out of control.

 Next I painted the planet which tured out really well. I painted a light green base, then mixed a darker green, taped it, and spritzed it with the airbrush to created a fade of small paint dots over the light green. I then went back and did the black lines which will mix with the planet rings.

 Here is the lower planet. I painted yellow on the left first, then orange on the right. I then spritzed orange over the yellow section to create the fade. I had to go back and spritz some yellow over the orange section to help the fade to be consistent.

 Here I went back and softened the edges of the purple and blue and added the bubbles by hand. I use Createx airbrush paint whether I am airbrushing or painting by hand. Once the colors dry, they are a perfect match and you can't see where the touch-ups were made.

 I hand painted the detail work on the lower planet using photo graphs as a close template.

 Here I have started applying decals that I designed in the computer very laboriously. A lot of the center explosion was hand painted.

 Some of the decals were done in two parts. The yellow flames were done on white decal paper. The letters and circles of the inserts were done on clear.

 Once it was finished and final touch-ups were done, I cleared it again with Varathane.

Overall, it was a fun experience and I learned a lot by dissecting the painting process. By deciding about layers and which pieces to do with an airbrush, which to do by hand and which to do digitally, I learned a lot about my abilities and what works best in different situations.