How To Clear Coat a Pinball Playfield – Part 5
| Degree of difficulty: Challenging!
But get's easier with practice. Time: 6 hours Items needed: For a compete list of ALL products used, |
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In this series of videos I will go step-by-step through what is involved in Clear Coating a Pinball Playfield. If you have any questions or comments, please post them down towards the bottom of the page and I'll get back to you ASAP. - PinDude
DISCLAIMER: These instructions & videos are provided to help. You are responsible for following all safety precautions when using all products.
The first day was cleaning the playfield and putting the first two coats on it. The next day I worked on it was wet sanding the playfield, filling the inserts, wet sanding again and laying the last two coats of clear.
This is the final day - we'll be wet sanding and doing the final buffing and cleaning and at that point it'll be almost ready for assembly.
The last two coats came out good but they're not anywhere near perfect. I'm not the best sprayer in the world. I have bumps and vapor pops to get out. I also need to sand the inserts a little bit more. If you have a better spray then you wouldn't be wet sanding as much.
Wet Sanding the Pinball Playfield
I'm going to start with 600 grit sand paper (all wet with warm water and a drop of dish soap) then 800, 1000, 1200, 1500 and the last sanding will be with 2,000 grit sand paper. It sounds like a lot but it's really not. It's maybe 5 to 10 minutes per sand paper. We're going to work on that and then I'll show you the buffing.
We're going to start the wet sanding with 600 grit wet/dry sand paper. The nice thing about sanding this time as opposed to the other day when I was sanding (after the 1st two coats). That day, the playfield was more unlevel and I had a lot more little issues with it - the sanding was kind of hard. Now the playfield is so level after these last two coats that I am putting no effort into sanding what-so-ever. It is just real easy to do. That's why this whole process will go real quick. There's nothing exciting about this process. This is what makes the ultimate finish totally glass like. I'm going to continue with this and step through the grits and I'll come back when I've done the final sanding.
Clean Up the Pinball Playfield
I just finished the 2,000 grit wet/dry sand paper sanding. As you can see, it made quite a mess - all the white gunky stuff all over the place. Before I buff, I need to get that all off - I don't want that mixing in with the polishing compound. So first I'm going to wipe it down. To get alot of the milky surface water off we'll wipe it down. And there is the white stuff in the holes again - I'm going to use my air line and blow all of this stuff out. You don't have to go crazy with this part because you're going to get more stuff in the holes when you do the buffing - so you'll have to clean it again. After I do this I'll go in with a q-tip and some windex or Novus 1 (a light cleaner) and I'll clean out all the slots and holes - get the majority of it out. I'll wipe down the playfield again and then we'll be on to polishing/buffing.
We've got the playfield cleaned up pretty good. You can see that it already has a pretty good shine to it. Each time you step the grit of the wet sand paper up it starts getting shinier. By the time you get to 2,000 you've already kind of done a buffing on it. To bring up the shine even more, that's when we bring out the buffer.
Buffing the Pinball Playfield
I'm going to start with my Wenn 4" buffer and a medium cut rubbing compound. Then we're going to go to a swirl remover and finish up with Novus 2. First I want to get the pad on the buffer soaked in. This gets messy. A little bit goes a long way. You don't want to put so much on that you're spraying it all over the place - that'd make a big mess and more of it would get down in the holes. All I'm doing is putting a little dab on the buffing wheel and work that around on the playfield by hand - try and get the whole playfield covered with it. If you just put a dab down and turn the buffing wheel on you'll be wearing it. Once we get that on there we'll start bufffing. This is a random orbit buffer and this is more of what you want. It does a good job and you can't burn the clear coat. If you're just using an arbor on your drill and you push down too hard you could actually burn right through the clear coat or leave a little mar on the clear coat.
So this process shouldn't take all that long. Once we get done with the medium cut we'll switch to the swirl remover which will help get rid of some of the marks that this rougher compound left on the playfield - you'll see little swirls just like you do when you do this on your car. By the time we get down to using the Novus 2 this will be looking like a sheet of glass.
We just got done with the last buffing with Novus 2 and you can see it is a little dull. That's because the last coat of Novus 2 is on there and it has dried up a bit. What I'm going to do next is take a nice clean, dry buffing wheel and use it on the playfield. It doesn't take much - as you can see, it now has a real nice shine to it.
Clean the Pinball Playfield - Again!
Next we have to clean out all the gunk in the holes. There's buffing compound in there. I'll now do my best to clean it out. Then I'll go over it one more time with Novus - then buff that out and we'll be done.
You can see that this playfield looks pretty good. I don't like to re-assemble it right away. The clear is still a little soft. It's only been basically a day since I did the final coat. I like to let this sit for about 2 weeks so it can fully cure. Then I'll give it a good waxing and start putting it back together.
This is the end of day 3 of working on this clear coat project. Total time spent is maybe 5 or 6 hours that I have invested in this. It is well worth it to do it yourself. I hope this video helped you. You can e-mail me with any questions. There's also great information at PinRepair.com about this process. I hope you enjoyed the video and now that I got this project done I'll be moving on to something else.
- PinDude
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