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Tutorial 02 - Backglass Restore - Stitching Images Together

Now I'm lucky enough to have access to Adobe Creative Cloud Suite through work as we have a Marketing and Design Dept.

Now I've never really used either before, preferring to use http://photofiltre.free.fr/frames_en.htm for personal use at home. Been using it for years and long ago used to use Paint Shop Pro before Corel bought them out. I've only ever done REALLY basic stuff.

So with some trepidation I dived it.

I have 4 images I needed to stitch together. Luckily Photoshop has a built in option to do this automagically. I'll show you stitching together two of the images. I can't show the full one yet due to missing the centre section. (see previous post)

Starting with Top Left and Top Right which currently look like this. Note they are in separate Windows. Disregard the fact that the image below is in Adobe Illustrator. Purely for display purposes.

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1 - Open Up Photoshop

2 - Select File, Automate, Photomerge

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3 - Click Browse and select the images you're joining

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4 - Ensure Auto is selected and Click OK

Photoshop will now do its magic and blends the images together with no overlap and a seamless join. It will take a few minutes depending on how powerful your computer is,

5 - Save the image as a new file.

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Notice despite a massive overlap in the original two images, Photoshop managed to merge them perfectly into a single image. What an awesome and powerful tool!

Next step, Vectorising

Cheers,

Brad

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You have seen the different colours on this back-glass. How many screen print layers was the glass done originally in the factory on this back-glass?.

 

Hard to imagine the glass was originally screen printed and directly onto glass with such accuracy.

 

They must have used super fast drying paint or the factory would have been full of drying back-glasses waiting for the different layers of paint to dry.

 

Thanks for the excellent pictorial explaining for others to follow by the way.

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You have seen the different colours on this back-glass. How many screen print layers was the glass done originally in the factory on this back-glass?.

 

Hard to imagine the glass was originally screen printed and directly onto glass with such accuracy.

 

They must have used super fast drying paint or the factory would have been full of drying back-glasses waiting for the different layers of paint to dry.

 

Thanks for the excellent pictorial explaining for others to follow by the way.

 

I'm certainly no expert but it looks to me from the physical evidence that it's been done in layers (one per colour). The blending and light up areas would attest to that.

 

Brad

Edited by Brad
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Tutorial 03 - Backglass Restore - Vectorising

Okay after bringing the backglass into work again and scanning the missing middle section I had 6 images I needed to merge into one. Using the method described in tutorial 2 I managed to get a single file of the full image. Weighing in at a hefty 1Gb in size as a Photoshop File! Now since I need to vectorise this and the Application I'm using doesn't support Photoshop files I had to export this into a PNG for best results. End result is a have a really high resolution image which is 90Mb in size.

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So time to vectorise. We want to vectorise the image as its currently a raster image. Retouching a raster image is a huuuuge amnount of work as it's at the pixel level. Now there are tools and methods to mitigate that but since I'm a complete novice and have no idea I'm going a much easier route.

Vectorising an image essentially turns objects in a raster image from pixels to shapes. That's probably a simplistic term but I repeat I'm a n00b when it comes to this.

Now Photoshop and/or Illustrator can do this using the Tracing Tool but it's manual and a large amount of work. So I'm using a product called Vector Magic. This effectively automates the job by importing the image, in this case, the image above, taking some settings options and hitting go. I'm not going to go through all the steps except to say I didn't use the One Touch option as the result wasz pretty ordinary for a picture this faded and complex. I tweaked some settings, told it to save as an AI file (Adobe Illustrator) and hit go. About 5 minutes later it spat out a file that went from 90Mb in size down to 8.5Mb. A much simpler format and therefore less data to store in the file.

So what it does is analyse the colour data in the image and attempts to trace shapes around all colour regions. You can see an example below.

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Note the blue outline. This is where I hover my mouse cursor within Illustrator and it highlights that shape. The entire image is now in this format! Note the shape line follows where the colour is the same. Everywhere the colour changes, you get a new shape.

Lets zoom in on a distinctive feature to get a better look at it.

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All of those different colours are a separate shape within the file now making it MUCH easier to change its colour. Notice how crisp and sharp those lines are. On my practice image I used a DLSR capture and those lines were jaggy as hell. Scanning the backglass as high resolution produced a vastly superior image to work with and it shows in this result.

Note how many shapes are in this image and this is NOT zoomed in.

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Next up: Touching up colours

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Tutorial 04 - Backglass Restore - Re-Touching Colours

Now we can get on to re-colourising this image. All of the colours on mine are massively faded along with sections where the paint is gone totally. We need to restore not only the fill but the correct shade. The easiest way is to grab the correct colours from another image. We can't use mine as a reference due to the massive fading. So I had to try and find a reference image that would suit. The problem is that I cannot find a really good reference. Every time you change an image format, process it, reduce it for the web etc, the image colours get changed so will not be accurate. I hunted high and low and these were the best I could find.

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Note the difference in each image, particularly with the shading of each colour. All completely different. So realistically I'm never going to get the 100% correct colour, but I can get close. Ultimately I chose the bottom left as the best of a bad bunch as its a repro backglass, despite being a jpg and low resolution.

My backglass and the reference image side by side.

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I'm going to pick a detailed part, zoom in and start re-colourising.

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Again note my scanned image on the left and the pixelated mess reference image on the right!

In Adobe Illustrator you need to have the two images opened up side by side. We start by selecting the shape I want to re-colour. Let's start with a blue section.

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Once selected, press i on your keyboard. This opens the eye dropper tool. If you click and then drag the eye-dropper tool to the colour you want to use from the reference image and let go the shape you selected turns into that colour.

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And done

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Now you can play around with the colours and even edit them within Illustrator to get a shade that looks and feels right so don't feel too concerned that it might be a little off. To make that easier, once you pick a colour stick with it across the entire glass and later you can mass select ALL elements with the same colour and change them all at once. Normally I'd stick with one colour and do ALL elements across the glass that need that colour but for this tutorial I'll just concentrate on this head. Once you have an element coloured in your image use that as your new reference colour.

Select the next element, press i and click on your reference element. Rinse and repeat.

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Filled in right side of weird mid-60's hat

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Hat, eye shadow and inside mouth done

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Orange shading

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Face colours done

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Now the blacks

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Comparison

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Now I'm pretty lucky with this glass as its fairly simple and doesn't have a lot of colours something like 14-15. So whilst tedious it's going to be a fairly quick image restore.

That should be it for my little image tutorials. It's just more of the same now. I'll update with the finished product when done. I hope they help you out. I taught myself how to do this in a few days and there might be better ways to do it but it works for me 😃

Cheers,

Brad

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Okay with Christmas and work I've not had loads of time for this but I have been plugging away at the backglass restore and its coming up really nice. I had my son over for Christmas and before he left I had him help me muscle this unbelievably heavy unit outside so I can do some work on it.

I began splicing the the harness to the headbox together. There are three plugs that had their wires cut =(

Anyway the wires are colour coded so I wanted to splice them together to fault fins and work out what I might need. I started working on in it and all was good until I came across a plug where 2 of the same colour pattern was used. I initially though they might be blue/yellow and blue gold but even with a magnifying glass they're identical. Unlike on the largest harness where like pair terminated in the same pin, these ones are different.

Any idea on how I can identify which pairs should be joined?

Cheers,

Brad

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Okay with Christmas and work I've not had loads of time for this but I have been plugging away at the backglass restore and its coming up really nice. I had my son over for Christmas and before he left I had him help me muscle this unbelievably heavy unit outside so I can do some work on it.

 

I began splicing the the harness to the headbox together. There are three plugs that had their wires cut =(

 

Anyway the wires are colour coded so I wanted to splice them together to fault fins and work out what I might need. I started working on in it and all was good until I came across a plug where 2 of the same colour pattern was used. I initially though they might be blue/yellow and blue gold but even with a magnifying glass they're identical. Unlike on the largest harness where like pair terminated in the same pin, these ones are different.

 

Any idea on how I can identify which pairs should be joined?

 

Cheers,

 

Brad

I'd trace the wires and see where they go. I'd also look at the female half of the Jones plug and trace the wires. My feeling is if they are the same colour, they go to the same thing?

 

Sent from my SM-G900I using Aussie Arcade mobile app

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Both good ideas but I've just solved it.

 

Not sure wether its by design OR a manufacturing run but I put all 4 wires side by side. On two of them the spaces between the blue and the yellow are slightly off. Enough so that after 3-4 repeats 2 wires clearly have a slightly larger gap.

 

Cheers,

 

Brad

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Both good ideas but I've just solved it.

 

Not sure wether its by design OR a manufacturing run but I put all 4 wires side by side. On two of them the spaces between the blue and the yellow are slightly off. Enough so that after 3-4 repeats 2 wires clearly have a slightly larger gap.

 

Cheers,

 

Brad

Gottlieb has blu-yel and blu+yel designations on their schematics with similar meaning, but they are a little more distinct. I don't recall seeing them side by side like this, but I've never had to repair a cut harness like this.

 

Really good work getting this back together.

 

Sent from my SM-G900I using Aussie Arcade mobile app

Edited by ajfclark
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An artwork update. Still have two player score reel sections to finish and then a fair bit of tidying up with shapes, lines and the text on the bottom left.

Original Scan on the left, my rework on the right obviously 😉

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I hope you soldered & used heat shrink on the harness repair. Not twist the wires & tape it. :o

You raise a good point. I was focused on the wires so I didn't notice the electrical tape over the joins, which always seems to lose its stickiness after a few years and fall off on me. Maybe I just have shit electrical tape though?

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Gemini2544 said:
I hope you soldered & used heat shrink on the harness repair. Not twist the wires & tape it. 😮

LOL You know I didn't solder 😉

No I heeded Wiredoug's advice and hooked it up temporarily to see if anything worked and then isolate what might not before going over the machine.

I'm teaching myself a LOT of the skills required to do this restore as I go. Soldering is a biggie for me as I'm REALLY bad at it. I was contemplating using terminal blocks but just to set your mind at ease I bought one of these last week.

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I need to practice and also there is almost no slack in that harness so its going to be super awkward.

Now once I'd powered it up, I thought hmm, nothing going on then remembered you have to press the left flipper button. So did that and in what I thought was a miracle it fired up, bulbs and all. Fortunately the machine had already been set to free play (the coin mech is missing) and pressing the start game button fired it up. I played the machine for a good 20 minutes noting issues. I ended the game, reset the machine and now it won't play a game anymore. Loads wrong as you can see in the video below.

  • Player 1 & 2 Score Reels do not reset properly. 2nd reel from the left on Player 2 slips.
  • Credit Counter doesn't move at all and in fact the current facing spot is blank
  • Game now no longer starts as its I assume trying to reset the score reels
  • Left Flipper on the right hand pair, doesn't work or just shudders slowly partially moves (Assuming its a coil problem)
  • As expected rubbers are kaput
  • 2 lifted roll-overs and one missing one
  • Pop bumpers need work and the plastics need to be replaced
  • Plastics are filthy. I bought some novus and will test but they probably need to be replaced.
  • Playfield is filthy, so will test spot with Novus to see the result.
  • Appears to be mylared and not too bad but I have zero experience in this so I could be dreaming

Plenty more to note.

The upside is the roulette wheel works and works well!

http://harmoniseit.com/pinballrestore/startup.mp4

Cheers,

Brad

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No need to worry about having not much experience with soldering, an EM is probably the best thing to practice on, as you dont need to be too accurate and it doesnt matter much if you make a mess - not like soldering components on a circuit board.

 

theres a relay in the back of the headbox that controls the reset of the two score reels - usually one relay for p1+p2 and another relay for p3+p4. Check and clean all contacts. Did player ones tens and hundreds unit turn when you played your first game? if so then it is just a bad connection to do with resets.

 

manually reset the score reels back to zero to make sure thats the only reason why the game is not starting anymore - most likely thats the only reason.

 

credit counter not moving might be part of the hack job someone did to get it to "free play". Sometimes people make a huge mess of things....

 

You sure "lifted rollovers" is a problem? from your last picture they look fine (cant zoom in though), the rollovers on those early williams were designed to just sit up above the playfield. If they are up too high, its as simple as just bending a metal leaf switch... under the playfield you will see that they are screwed directly onto a metal leaf switch, bend it down a bit to sink them into the playfield a bit more.

 

Your plastics may be filthy, but they dont look to be damaged, thats a real huge bonus :)

Just a note, in case you repeat my insanely stupid mistake... when you take off the top right large plastic, take note that there is one screw thats about half a centimeter shorter than the rest, I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice... and I put it back in the wrong spot... it took much longer than I'd like to admit for me to realise why my pop bumpers were constantly on - I had put a long screw in where the short one should be and it had gone through the playfield and held the pop bumper relay on.... so the lesson learnt is take note of exactly where each piece goes back on the playfield as some might have small variations...

 

The edges of a mylar stick out like a sore thumb, you would either have a build up of dirt at the edges or just run your finger over a suspected edge of the mylar and you should feel a large drop down to the playfield.

 

A working captive ball spinner is great! Those things are really annoying...

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This right here is gold @Brk_oth It certainly helps a LOT that you've recently restored one of these

 

No need to worry about having not much experience with soldering, an EM is probably the best thing to practice on, as you dont need to be too accurate and it doesnt matter much if you make a mess - not like soldering components on a circuit board.

 

Yes I'm probably over-estimating the difficulty but I cannot convey enough how badly I solder LOL!

 

theres a relay in the back of the headbox that controls the reset of the two score reels - usually one relay for p1+p2 and another relay for p3+p4. Check and clean all contacts. Did player ones tens and hundreds unit turn when you played your first game? if so then it is just a bad connection to do with resets.

 

manually reset the score reels back to zero to make sure thats the only reason why the game is not starting anymore - most likely thats the only reason.

 

Yeah that's my guess. Players 1's, 10's resets it's just the hundreds and when I nudged it a bit it turned over for a bit than stopped again.

 

 

credit counter not moving might be part of the hack job someone did to get it to "free play". Sometimes people make a huge mess of things....

 

You might be right. At this stage I have no idea. I did note when lifting the playfield that at least 2 switches are wired shut. Haven't looked closely at why yet but I took photos.

 

 

You sure "lifted rollovers" is a problem? from your last picture they look fine (cant zoom in though), the rollovers on those early williams were designed to just sit up above the playfield. If they are up too high, its as simple as just bending a metal leaf switch... under the playfield you will see that they are screwed directly onto a metal leaf switch, bend it down a bit to sink them into the playfield a bit more.

 

Well these are pretty high and crooked so I suspect need at least a little adjustment :unsure

 

Your plastics may be filthy, but they dont look to be damaged, thats a real huge bonus :)

Just a note, in case you repeat my insanely stupid mistake... when you take off the top right large plastic, take note that there is one screw thats about half a centimeter shorter than the rest, I wasn't paying attention and didn't notice... and I put it back in the wrong spot... it took much longer than I'd like to admit for me to realise why my pop bumpers were constantly on - I had put a long screw in where the short one should be and it had gone through the playfield and held the pop bumper relay on.... so the lesson learnt is take note of exactly where each piece goes back on the playfield as some might have small variations...

 

LOL I'm bagging. labeling AND including before photos with everything I touch.

 

 

The edges of a mylar stick out like a sore thumb, you would either have a build up of dirt at the edges or just run your finger over a suspected edge of the mylar and you should feel a large drop down to the playfield.

 

I'll check it out but you can see a layer of plastic or something over it around the edges.

 

A working captive ball spinner is great! Those things are really annoying...

 

Yep it works fine, noisy as hell though lol

 

Thanks for the pointers =)

 

Brad

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Some random shots looking over it yesterday

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Random shots from all over. Notice the wired shut switches.

Okay legs are in their bath.

I managed to fit all 4 in there. FYI, 5 Litres of Evaporust JUST covered them. I was pouring away and got pretty concerned near the end :blink:

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