BINGO PINBALLS

 

Overhaul - Silver Sails - Cosmetics

Anything 40+ years old that saw a little action is going to show it's age.

cabinet front
Silver Sails
cabinet front

Here we see the metal plate that a lot of operators installed to make it a little harder to pry open the coin door. This must have been done after the fact, because some repainting was done (with no attempt to reproduce the original design). The bottom corners used to have some metal brackets on them which were removed before I got the game. The bolt holes remained, though.

Normally, when I work on someone elses game, I don't do much with the cosmetics. It takes a lot of time and I really don't enjoy it a whole lot. However, since I had the bruce's game for so long, I decided to clean up the paint problems.


interior rail flaking
Silver Sails
rail flaking
Problems? Well, yeah. The other area of major paint damage was flaking of the paint on the interior cabinet rails. These rails can be removed by gently prying under the rail to pull out the twist/drive nails. Use something flat and wide like a paint scraper.

The rail is has a couple bends and it forms the channel that the playfield glass slides into. Usually the horizontal part the glass is sitting on is rusted and/or gunked up with years of bar spills. When it's this bad, remove the whole thing, scrape off all the existing paint, and repaint using a spray enamel.


Repainting the cabinet front

removing cabinet parts
Silver Sails
removing cabinet parts
This should give you an idea of what you are in for if you decide to repaint the front of the cabinet. To do the job right, you must remove all the hardware and the door. To get the buttons/bolts and ball shooter out, you really want the ball trough and ball lift mechanism out of the way. Easiest thing is to just remove them.

Laying around in the cabinet in this pic is mostly parts from the coin door itself, along with the green/blue buttons from the cabinet.


removing door parts
Silver Sails
removing door parts
Here's what the door looked like under the metal plate. The wood filler above the coin return hole was probably why the plate was put on to begin with. One curious thing is the light blue paint showing through the yellow and around the button rings. After making templates of the graphics, I filled in the bolt holes from the metal plate and did some sanding to clean up the filler. Underneath the Silver Sails graphics was Golden Gate artwork. This is also true of the cabinet itself. It looks like Bally simply painted over some Golden Gate cabinets when making the Silver Sails games.
repainted cabinet/door
Silver Sails
repainted front
Here's the result of a lot of hours (the door isn't all the way closed in this pic). I used latex paint, mostly because it can be removed fairly easily if someone wants to redo it. After I finished, Cary emailed me a pic of what the door should look like. There isn't supposed to be a red hull on the sailboat on the door. oops.

The other problem, which I may need to do something about, is paint on the inside of the door opening. The door closes snugly, and the paint on the door tends to want to adhere to the paint on the cabinet - result is the door sticks a little.

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