I am finally trying to make some headway with this playfield. It’s such a colossal mess. The short version is that some previous owner sprayed Varathane (or similar) clear coat all over the playfield but did so without removing much of anything. Posts, metal, leaf switches, etc all got sprayed. Not only is it grossly yellow-green (which i could probably live with), it’s bumpy and flaking in areas too, and if i’m going to enjoy this taxi the playfield better be pretty much flat.
I’ve tried various solvents to soften it up to peel/sand/scrape it off, but nothing really works. I decided to go ahead and remove the stickers that were used for the inserts and other graphic areas. Pretty sure I found the stickers on ebay so i may end up using myself. There was just no way to remove the coating without damaging the stickers so i yanked them.
Of course the sticker residue then needed to be removed, so i broke out the trusty Goo Gone and flour trick. Worked like a charm and actually seemed to have some impact on the yellow (i refuse to call it “clear”) coat. I’m going to try soaking in goo gone and using flour again tonight to see if it might just soften up the yellow enough to scrape. I found that the yellow peels up relatively easily from certain parts of the playfield (the green area was a breeze), but doesn’t want to budge from the gray road. There are a lot of gray touch ups under the yellow and i’m guessing that it’s sticking to those but not the other areas due to poor surface prep (finally the laziness of the offending owner is paying off for me). You can see in the two detail photos above what a difference it makes when the yellow is removed, such a contrast!
I’m really unsure about how to approach this. I have several options.
1. Painstakingly peel and remove the yellow, doing as little damage to the graphics as possible. There will be wear spots and damage (unavoidable), but i would generally ignore these, put on the sticker kit, then clear and block sand flat. I am leaning this direction but it all hinges on whether the goo gone can be a helper and whether or not the plastic scraper blades I ordered help get it off.
2. Sand this thing down completely, buy a full playfield overlay sticker from a dude on pinside, then clear it. This is enticing because it would be a final solution and would make the pin easy to sell if i chose to do that. But the overlay is expensive and i’m not entirely certain i can get it on without making a mistake.
3. As i was messing with this I started fantasizing about custom painting the entire playfield as a personal interpretation of Taxi. This would be crazy time consuming but probably pretty satisfying too. Very likely nobody else would appreciate it. It would also make it hard not to want to change the graphics EVERYWHERE on the machine which would mean making new plastics and on and on. It would require me to make quite a lot of waterslide decals to handle text and fine line graphics, especially over inserts. This route would be insane but I could imagine really loving it in the end (personally).
I should be able to test the scraper by Friday night. If it works i’ll probably go with #1, but if it doesn’t i’ll start sanding and then make a decision about #2 versus #3.
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