Williams Space Odyssey EM Pinball Machine Repair Part 1 - Repainting The Playfield

ladies and gentlemen this is Joe's classic video games back with another arcade related video for you that today we are starting to work on this space odyssey pinball machine we got this thing years ago and it's in pretty rough shape so we're going to do what we can to fix it up it ain't looking pretty though folks needs a lot of work the cabinet's pretty rough I don't know if we can really do much about that though we may leave that kind of worn of course we'll clean it up the best we can an loves Walter all right an we don't appreciate that an all right so this thing's pretty rough the back glass on on a lot of these the red just completely disappears and that's happened on this you can see right through the damn back back glass every where the red was uh so all that's flaked we have to be repaired we've got problems with the white all over the place the blue was held up pretty good but if you look really close you can see that the light blue is starting to F flake look at that crap areas like this are now see-through so basically the back glass if I was going to give it a grade it's about a four out of a 10 maybe that's being generous that's GNA need a lot of work um the cabinet same thing maybe a four out of a 10 starting off um the problem with it is if you try to touch it up like if you just try to repaint the white it looks like crap it just doesn't look right you have to sand it down put Bondo in it fill it in then repaint it and then you need to put your stencil on ton of work um so in if you're if you're going to attempt to just touch it up it looks worse than how it looks now and if you uh if you're not if you're going to repaint the whole thing I mean you're talking it's like doing uh body work on a car or something I mean it's like 10 15 hours worth of work to get the the cabinet looking decent so we may not do that I'm just saying that up front the back glass we're going to touch up with some paint by hand because I don't have an airbrush so we're going to see how good we can get that and then I think it'll actually end up looking decent it won't look like a new one but it'll look decent now you may be able to buy a new back glass for it but you're talking probably $300 so you know you kind of have to weigh do you want to spend $300 on a new back glass for a machine that's not in very great shape um so then we've got the Playfield here and at first like a cursory glance it looks all right it looks a little a little dirty right but then the more you look the more you see like for instance it was missing this part but I ordered one that's like a New Old Stock one and uh up here we're looking pretty good right we've got all of our Plastics look pretty good yeah the Plastics are fun we've still got the original spinner here so that's fine um but then you've got this issue going on all over the Playfield um where it had cracks in the paint and somebody went along and put the wrong color paint on it see that crap you don't even notice it at first but like look at that you see that people what are you doing to me look at this over here look at that look at all that blue there that's been replaced and then look it comes all down through here wrong color wrong color wrong color wrong color wrong color look at that so they' painted all over the Playfield like it's a paint by Numbers Game and it's the wrong color so now I have to do the same thing so I'm going have to go back through it and try to get the color a little better and paint it back in so that's what we're going to do in this video so stay tuned and and we'll see how it comes out but I just wanted to show what we were starting with I'm going to show underneath the Playfield too so you can get a good little uh example of how we began so let's see what we've got here it's just a cursory glance uh looks pretty good really we've got everything's Dusty of course but that's to be expected it looks like it's complete on that bottom panel I don't see anything missing the score U the motor the score motor what's it called the score unit score motor score motor looks pretty good um got some stuff unplugged of course I haven't figured this out yet look at this they put a hook on the Playfield that goes right there I guess for some reason they wanted it where you could not lift the play field but how could you if glass was on it I don't get it folks don't get it maybe it was somewhere at some point with no glass on it um we've got all these relays here on the side they all look pretty good stepper unit looks pretty good that one as well this motor here makes a little Target move in the center of the Playfield so actually the uh mechanically it looks pretty good so uh we'll work through all that of course and uh that'll be fine all this looks pretty decent so mainly our problems with this game are cosmetic it's the worst uh three problems to have right so the cabinet's rough and you can't really rep paint it because it'll look like crap right the play field is rough and you kind of have to repaint it but it's going to look a little iffy I'm going to do the best job I can and then the back glass is rough and we're going to have to repaint it and it's going to look a little iffy when I'm done so it's it's like the worst three problems to have you've got the back glass and the reason I'm saying that is if let's say this relay had caught on fire well I could throw that relay in the damn trash and buy another one just like it right because all this stuff was used on several games but the only game that had that was Space Odyssey the only game that had this was space odysse or space mission um and then uh the only game with this cabinet is space odysse or space mission so they're not really easy to replace and they're expensive to replace because it would be expensive to ship any of that so it's expensive to ship a cabinet so like if I find a guy in Ohio that's got a cabinet that's in better shape it's going to cost $2 $300 just to get it to me right Playfield probably going to be $150 $200 if I'm lucky enough to find one in better shape back glass probably going to be $300 if I'm lucky enough to find one in better shape so all the expensive stuff on this one needs work um but we'll get started on it the first thing I'm going to do I'm going to tear down the Playfield and uh we'll see what it looks like with nothing on it be back with that okay we took everything off the Playfield and this is what we're starting with check it out filthy look at all that got my work cut out for me here folks but you know what we're going to run right through it I'm a very positive person and I'm positive we're going to run right through it so first thing to do clean clean clean so I need to clean this so what I'm going to do is I'm going to uh clean all the loose dirt off with literally like U uh 409 or or something you know to clean up the the dirt now if you've got a nice game you don't really want to do that because if you get the wood wet it'll start warping and stuff and do what this is one has already been doing but this thing's so filthy I got to use something with a little bit of edge to it once I get it cleaned off um so you know usually you don't want to use moisture if it's fairly clean you can just clean it with wax wax is actually a cleaner um but I'm going to have to use something with a little little water in it to make this happen uh so I'm going to clean it all up and then I'm going to use use uh rubbing alcohol and a magic eraser and go over everything and get it to look as good as possible and then we'll see what we're left with after that so be back in a minute okay folks so this is what we ended up with after cleaning it of course we haven't done anything to it to make it look better yet just tried to clean off some of the dirt and grime and we did hit it with the Magic Eraser and I'm actually kind of pleased with it because it uh I thought a bunch more of the paint would come off over here I thought that once I did it like a bunch more would flake off cuz it looked pretty rough but actually it all kind of stayed put now we did lose a bunch up here you can see all of that's pretty worn but I was going to have to repaint all that stuff anyway so we'll uh we'll see how that ends up and one of the good things about it is it's a very busy looking Playfield anyway all of the little white dots uh the little stars I shouldn't say white cuz it's not white but all the little stars and stuff in the background so all that kind of hides um all the little imperfections and stuff so it may end up looking all right I don't know but you guys are going to know because this video is going to be a lot shorter than me doing it in person right so I don't know what uh a few days from now is going to look like but you guys know what you you'll be able to see what 5 minutes from now is going to look right right look like right um so I'm I'm kind of happy with how it turned out after cleaning it but uh I'm going to start painting in some of the missing stuff and we'll see what we can do the best I advice I can give somebody if you're trying to do this is uh a big mistake people make a lot is they think that all of this is white like said I repaint things white like that and it's not white it's it may have originally been white but it's yellow now I mean it's that's straight up yellow you know or tan um so don't put any white anywhere on the Playfield it stands out like a sore thumb these these uh pot bumper skirts of course we'll probably replace and I didn't do anything with the flipper bats because we're going to take them off but it cleaned up fairly decent so we're starting with the at least we got all the loose paint off and most of the Dirt Off cleaning isn't really my strong point but cleaned up pretty good um what we're going to have to do is when we go through and after we repaint it we're going to have to clear coat a lot of it so a lot of these areas where it's kind of rough are going to end up clear coated you can see everywhere that it's been touched up that the paint they used was flat and the original paint has like a a sheen on it so you can see the light hitting it look how massive it was over there on that side they repainted a lot of it which we're going to too but after we get done with it we're going to clear it so it should all kind of have the same Sheen so it'll hide a lot of that you can see things like whenever you get close if it'll focus for you yeah see all the cracks in the paint so that's what that's the issue that they were having over there that's why they needed to replace that because it had cracked all the way down the Playfield I guess they call that alligatoring or something like that so it have done that on that whole side now now with that said if you look down here these are little the ball can fall in there and then this kicks it back out towards the swinging Target there's one on each side they did that little trick on a bunch of different games and usually whenever they do that the play field is worn All To Hell coming out of that so there'll be a like a a wear line right it's not on this machine it's not worn on this one why is that it's because the damage on this machine isn't from where isn't from play like you don't get damage like that from the ball it's because this thing's been wet I don't know how it got wet or what happened but basically this was somewhere where water sat on it or leaked on it um for a long period of time which also explains why the back glass a lot of that is flaked off and which also explains stuff like this so doesn't mean you know some people if they're you know frankly better at at fixing these probably wouldn't even start with one like this they start with a nicer machine but we've got it we're certainly not going to throw it in the trash we're going to fix it so we're going to go through and make it as good as possible considering and when it's done the thing the damn thing's going to play good you know it's just not going to look brand new but you know for the price point and for for uh such a good working game and ultimately such a fun game the reason we're we're going through all the trouble on this particular one is because this is a fun game Space Odyssey and space mission excellent electromechanical gam so it's worth the effort to uh get it back working so we're going to we're going to go through it the first thing we're going to do is we're going to start touching up some of that paint we've got it clean we're going to start touching it up and uh we'll be back after we touch a little bit of it up to see what your opinion is all right folks I'm putting in some of the blue as you can see we're can you here you can watch what I'm talking about here check this out so I had to mix it up a little bit and we're just going through basically when they repainted it they they painted it back into to light so we mixed it the proper color and now I had to go back through and paint everything that they painted too light back the proper color so that can to show you what I'm talking about why you think so we'll keep doing it and we'll show you uh so you can see where I've done that swatch like I've done this this is untouched so you can see it's matching pretty good we got to get rid of all of that yucky yucky yucky too light white I mean too light blue so we'll keep at it okay we finished up the blue which in my humble opinion I think pretty much saved the Playfield before that I think it looked pretty rough and now I'm thinking it's starting to look pretty good we still got to do a lot of the other colors we did the yellow and the blue so far whenever the black uh is the most important but it's it's pretty easy to get it right so whenever we go back in and put black around all the inserts and all that it'll help it out a lot but some of the red needs touched up still some of that aqua color needs touched up still and then there's a highlight on that too there's like a you can see it like up here on this rocket see how there's two colors so both of them need done and then the yellow which is um underneath the Plastics like the cream colored whenever we do that too we're probably going to add some of the missing stars that are over here where we repainted most of it we're probably add some of them in to so what do you think we think it looks pretty good so we'll be back when we do some more okay folks so we finished up the paintt and figured we'd film a little video of how good we were able to get it or how bad we were able to get it whichever you prefer so this is what we ended up with now remember a lot of this will be covered with um um Plastics and stuff too so on this on this one one thing that we ran into on the blue was that the blue is still this is actually the original color of the blue where it's nice and light and bright it had dark darkened like it seems like most of the paint on this side of the Playfield was darker than the paint on this side of the Playfield so whenever we over here we got a pretty good color match on the blue over here it was a little bit off you can see how it's not perfect but since it's a little darker your eye doesn't notice it as much so it worked out pretty good we touched up with the red a little bit uh which came out pretty good it wasn't a perfect color match like you can see it right there see under the 5,000 you can see this a little bit different but again like I said this thing was in pretty rough shape so we weren't going to get it perfect but we did pretty good the yellow I didn't do that somebody else had already done that so we left it alone isn't a perfect match but um we did the dark green which came out pretty good um matter of fact I can't even point out any places now where I definitely oh here's some you can see there where it's a little bit off you know but from a distance you don't even notice it this part here was pretty heavy that whole thing was basically repainted so the the teal or whatever the light the U I guess that's teal was repainted the dark blue was repainted the green was repainted the red was repainted and then a lot of the yellow was touched up too and then we had to touch up some of the lettering which wasn't perfect as you can see also this part was really rough it touched it up pretty good again like I said in other videos people that are really good at this stuff probably think this is laughable but you saw what we started with it was pretty rough um we touched up a lot of the black um around the inserts which really helps if you've got one um that has wear around the inserts if you'll go back in and put your black circles back in it'll make it look a lot better just doing that there was a little touchup up here oh yeah we painted in that cream over here see you can tell if you know that it was done that's obviously been repainted but from a distance can't really tell like when I was just saying that did you notice that I had repainted most of that cream too probably not um so we think it came out pretty decent it's not perfect but not bad as well so what I'm going to do is I'm going to wax it we clear coated it too so with satin we don't like it whenever it's real shiny um but I'm going to wax it now and then I'm going to start putting everything back on it and I'll take a picture or I'll finish the video with it with the Plastics back on so you can see how it ended up okay so we put everything back on the Playfield and this is how it ended up I'm kind of happy with it as far as the Playfield looks it's definitely not perfect by the way I'm going to order new pop bumper uh caps and I'm also going to replace the pop bumper skirts that are ate up a little bit so I just put them back on for a photographic purpose and to test it but uh this is what we ended up with we put our new um gate up there that we had to order that was missing um we touched up paint all over the place as you are well aware if you watch this and I think it came out pretty good now you still got you've got areas like this that don't really look all that great they're not perfect but what it ended up looking like was that it's kind of like the Playfield stained a little bit at first glance you know so it just kind of gives it a patina isn't that a wonderful world word you get to use the word patina whenever you're selling something used and it's not in perfect cosmetic shape it has a good patina but I think it looks a lot I mean a hell of a lot better than it did because it doesn't have uh it doesn't necessarily have all the wear it just looks kind of you know not new anymore and uh I think that is much much much more presentable I think it took if I was going to put an hour um estimate on it it we probably spent about 8 hours total now we've done this over several days but uh we probably spent eight hours total on the Playfield maybe a little more um so it probably took uh an hour or a little over an hour to clean it and then you know disassemble it and clean it and it took probably uh an hour hour and a half to put it all back together and wax it and and everything and then the rest of the time was uh matching paint and touching up paint now you could make this much better if you wanted to so if you're a hobbyist and you're thinking about doing this to one you've got this just beat all hell you could do a much better job than we did by just spending more time on it so you know we didn't get the paint color exactly perfect if you spent more time on that you would uh get it uh more perfect we didn't uh get the stenciling perfect um so uh there were things we could have done to uh trying to see if his customer's coming in I don't believe he is um so there's things that we could have done to make it even better we're not trying to say that this thing's in perfect shape or anything like that we never represent them like that whenever we sell them um but we we think we saved a game that probably would have been parted out I think most people wouldn't have took the time to uh to go through and work on a Playfield that that would was that worn but there you go now what I'm going to do is I'm going to film another video uh where we go over the electronics fixing the electronics one this and then we're going to do another video where we try to save this back glass which is in horrible shape this back glass is about a four out of a 10 it's just got issues everywhere look at that the paint is flaking off all over the place so we're going to do a video where we try to save that uh in kind of a backwoods way and just see see what we can do um again it's a pretty worn game so we're going to do another video uh where we do the back glass and we're going to do yet another video where we do the electronics try to repair the game and get it back up and running so if you like any of these repair videos just subscribe to us those will be coming up soon and we'll see you on the next video by the way give us a thumbs up that helps us