How it all started

I acquired a Silverball Mania from a local homeowner who had had it in his rec room for ten years but was selling it now since his kids were out of the house and it wasn't used much anymore. I enjoyed hearing about all the fun the game had provided their family and was looking forward to getting it back into tip top shape.

The backglass was in decent shape but had some flaking in the lower right corner where the "Game Over" lights up and a 1/8 by about 1 inch scratch near the right center of the playfield. Neither really harmed the overall beauty of this fabulous artwork though. The playfield was filthy with lots of ball swirls and mylar on the playfield was starting to peel in places. The cabinet had a few minor knicks and dings and some operator at one time had engraved serial unmbers about 3/4 inch high in various places in the cabinnet wood. The player 4 and Credit/Ball displays were non-functional

However, the biggest task I faced in restoring this pin was that the inserts in the middle of the playfield were either completely worn away or at least had significant wear. Plus they were worn away undernieth a layer of mylar that had obvously been added after the fact. Finally, some of the inserts had been written on with a permanent marker. After searching all the usual sources and failing to find anyone who provided decals for these inserts I decided to take the plunge and make my own. Having never before attempted anything like this it was quite a leap of faith.

Before

After

After with lights on

Perfectionists STOP Here

If you are a perfectionist or a museum piece restorer exit this page NOW! My purpose in creating these inserts was to improve a feature of my game (worn inserts) that I found annoying and which detracted from my enjoyment of my game. My goal was to create something better than what I had and to that end I succeeded. The end result is not perfect, my methods are not perfect but it is my game and I'm happy. Hopefully, my experience will be of benefit to others attempting similar projects but if by any chance you disagree with me by advised - I don't care.

My Basic Approach

First step was to remove the mylar that was covering the inserts. I used the freeze spay method. The mylar was paper thin and tore easily. It ended up coming up in thin slivers and once in a while, if I was lucky, I might get a piece as large as two inches square. Even with the freeze spay I still managed to lift small fleks of paint in some area but fortunately they tended to be in the middle of solid color areas where they were easy to touch up.

As I said before it was the inserts in the middle of the play field that were worn and Silverball happens to have two of almost every instert and the ones along the tops and sides were in good shape for the most part. The insterts I needed to make decals for were "S", "I", "L", "V", "E", "R", "B", "A", "L", "L", "M", "A", "N", "I", "A", "2X", "3X", "4X", "5X", "15 Thousand", "30 Thousand" and the arrow shaped "When Lit". However while I was at it I decided to make a full set of all the insert images.

To start with I used a digital camera to take photos of all the inserts. Where there were duplicate insterts I took the picutre of the best looking one. Where actually I took the picture of the best looking example of any insert whether it had a duplicate or not. I took the picture both with the under insert lights off and on. I took the pictures by holding the camera by hand about six to eight inches above the playfield with the lens zoomed in to have the insert fill as much of the image field as possible and using dead reconing to hold it as parallel to the playfield as possible. I didn't really expect this to work very well and was expecting to end up with the images of round insterts looking slightly oval from any slight angle of the camera. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this wasn't the case. In certain cases, such as the arrow shaped insert that was supposed to say "When Lit" and is the only one on the playfield, I had to hunt the internet in places like the Internet Pinball Database (see my links page) or eBay until I found an image. Some inserts I had to go back and photograph over again until I got an image with sharp focus and good contrast. In general I found the images with the light on under the insert to work the best for my process.

To edit the images I used Adobe Photoshop 7.0 although any software with basic image editing features would probably work as well. It was the ability to use layers that really made this project possible as I used them to build up the images a step at a time. I should proably make it clear at this point that I am not a graphic artist nor do I play one on television. In fact I probably have the artistic ability of left footed wilderbeast. I am also not a Photoshop expert and so those of you who are will probably have a good laugh at the way I went about editing the images but in my own defense I will say that I did get the job done (at least to my own satisfaction).

Creating the Insert Outlines

I started off by creating blank insert images consisting of only the outer circle with a transparant interior. There are two sizes of circular insters one Silverball so naturally I made to corresponding base images. To create these I simply measured the outer and inner diamaters of the black circles on the inserts on the playfields. I then opened up Photoshop and created a new blank image with horizontal and vertical dimensions equal to the outer diameter of the black insert ring for the large insert. I then used the elispe tool to draw a black filled circle from edge to edge. This was my method for getting circle with the diameter I wanted. I then created another new image with the dimensions of the inner diameter of the insert outline. I then did a select all (Ctl + A) on the white image, selected the black image, created a new layer, and then did an Edit / Copy Mergeed (Ctl + Sht + C) to paste the white circle on top of the black circle. I then used the pointer tool to select the white circle and move it around until it was centered on the black circle.

A couple of tips at this point: 1) make sure you have View / Snap turned off when trying to position the white circle over the black and 2) many of the steps thoughout working on these insert images proved to be much easier when performed at a high zoom.

Once I had the white circle positioned where I wanted it I used Image / Duplicate... to create a second copy of the image to work on for the next step so that I would still have the original in case I messed up. (This kind of paranoia proved justified many times throughout the process of making these inserts.) On this duplicate image I then used Layer / Merge Visible (Ctl + Sht + E) to combine my two layers into a single layer and then used the magic erase tool to turn the white area transparant. I used the same process to create the two differnt sizes of black circles that I needed and saved the images to disk to use as the base image for each of the insert images.

Editing the Insert Pictures

Below are some of the insert pictures that I started with:

First step was to bring the image into Photoshop and to begin to cut away all of the image except the center part of the insert that I wanted. For this the magic eraser tool did a lot of the initial bulk erasing followed by the regular eraser with a fairly large brush size. I didn't bother trying to get rid of every extraneous pixel at this stage. I cropped the image to just include the part of the image I wanted and saved it to a file at this point.

The next step was to get rid of the color in the highlighted areas of the letter. Also since this was taken from a photograph the dark portion of the letter was actually multiple color shades and not pure black and I wanted to make the image closer to a a pure black and white image. To get rid of the orange color in the highlights I went back to my trusty magic eraser. I then used the fill tool will black color and clicked in several places withing the "appearantly" black image which had the effect of turning most of the image pure black except for a few pixels around the edges. Next I zoomed the image until individual pixels could be distinguished and used the brush tool with black and white colors and various pixel sizes to touch up the image. At this point I removed any odd pixels left laying around in the background. (You may need to click on some of these images to get the full size image in order to see the detail.)

Next I needed to lay the letter "E" into the black circle of the base insert image. To do this I loaded both images (the black circle base insert image and the "E" image) into Photoshop and then created duplicate images of each (that paranoia thing again). I created a new layer in the circle image so that when I moved the "E" image over I would be able to work on it without messing up the underlying circle. The "E" is of course out of proportion to the circle so I had to resize that image to fit within the circle and I did that by a laborious process of trial and error since each picture of an insert that I had taken was of a slightly different size. I would resize the image of the "E", "select all" for that image, then give focus to the circle image, and paste the image of the "E" into the new layer above the circle and use the Move tool to center the "E" relative to the circle. If it was the wrong size I would simply delete the "E" from the top layer of the circle image and go back to the "E" image, resize it and try again. As long as I was making the "E" smaller I would just pick up with the version of the "E" image I had used before. However, if I had made the "E" too small I found it better to go back to the original full sized copy of the "E" image and make a new copy of it and start over again. In general things work better going from a large image to a smaller one but not so well when you try to enlarge an image. When enlarging an image you tend to get more pixelation and other effects that tend to lose detail.

I repeated this process for each insert. Some of them took more touch up than others and some like the "2X" I never got a decent image to work from and so I had to start with on of the similar inserts such as the "3X' and ad lib. Hence, in the finished product some inserts came out better than others. Once I had an final image for each insert I flattened the image into a single layer and saved it as an individual Photoshop .PSD file.

Making a Print Sheet

After I had all of the individual images the next step was to combine them into a (well actually two) printable image. To do this I created a new image the size of the print area for my printer (7.5" by 10" allowing for margin space at the edges). Within this image I created a seperate layer for each image that I wanted to place on the page and then loaded the images into the layers. Ther reason I used a seperate layer per image was so that I could move each image around seperately until I had them placed just where I wanted them on the page. (This is probably one of those places where people familiar with Photoshop are probably laughing.) Once I had the insert images where I wanted tham on the page I flattened the image and saved it as a .jpg image. Because I wanted to create a complete set of insert decals even through I only needed a few in the miiddle of the playfield it actually took two sheets to hold all the images. Since there was then some room left over I included a bunch of empty circle images thinking that I might want to use them over some inserts that only had wear around the edges or maybe even on another game (but really simply because I had the space so I used it).

The full size version of each of the above images is 3.5 Meg so don't click on them unless you are on a fast connection

If you want to print a copy of these images for non-commercial use please feel free. They are designed to print at 600 DPI. Click on the images above to get to the full size images and then right click on those images and chose "Save picture as" from the pop up menu.

Printing the Decals

OK, so now that I had the decal images I needed something to print them on. Back to the internet search engines looking for some kind of clear adhesive material to print them on. I ended up finding a company called "hemmi papilio supplies" that sell various clear adhesive backed stock for laser and ink jet printers. I used a product they called "Window Adhesive Transperancy Film" which is no longer listed on their web site but they have several types of media and I had basically chosen this one at ramdom from among them. I also ordered their UV laminate so that the ink would be sandwiched between two layers of media.

I first print the decal images onto the adhesive transperancy film and applied a layer of the UV laminate over top of that. The end result of using these two materials was that I ended up with decals that were a bit thicker than I would have liked. I have used set of PinHeadz decals on an F-14 playfield and these were just a bit thicker than those.

The next step was to cut the decals out. I ended up going through a couple of sets of decals trying to find the best way to do this. Cutting them by hand was no good since I wanted a nice smooth circular edge. I ended up using a Fiskars Circle Cutter that I bought at the local craft store. The trick was to get the foot that the cutter rotates on set as exactly in the center of the insert I was cutting out as possible. Again I ruined a few until I got the hang of it.

Just as I am not an artist nor a Photoshop expert, I am also not an expert on printing and print media. Were the materials I chose suitable for this purpose? Will they withstand the wear of a pinball rolling over them and the heat from the bulb under the insert? Only time will tell. But then again I can always print another set if I need or want to.

Closing Comments

As I said at the beginning the final result is not perfect and wouldn't satisfy purists but I still think what I ended up with is better than the way the game looked before. More importantly I had fun with this project and learned a bunch and accomplished something that I didn't really think I could when I started. Only by trying and learning will we ever be able to develope the skills needed to keep these facinating machines working and looking good

I strongly encourage others in the hobby to try projects that stretch your abilities and to share the results with the rest of us.