A Different Approach: Direct Ink
The advent of flatbed UV curable ink electronic printers such as the
Colorspan
9840uv has brought about the possibility of printing the
artwork directly onto the playfield plank. Thus instead of
first printing onto a multi-layer piece of plastic, the artwork is
completely sanded off the old playfield, and it is then directly used
for printing.
John
Greatwich decided to develop this process, and I sent my old
playfield along with the modified artwork file to attempt the Direct
Ink method. My only cost was the shipping of the playfield to
him.
His first operation was to sand all the old artwork off, and to level
the surface.
The playfield, that was used for the overlay calibration
and test printing, sanded smooth.
Once all the old artwork
was removed, a white layer needs to be applied. This is
because most printers rely on printing onto a white substrate, and as a
result do not print the color white. I prepared the artwork
for this layer in Adobe Illustrator, by taking the Photoshop artwork,
and drawing the outlines for all the parts that are not to have
white. A machine then takes this file, and cuts out vinyl
stickers that are applied by hand to all the inserts. John
then sprayed a white layer from a spray can, and then removed the
masks. The result is below.
Step 2 is to mask the inserts and spray the white layer.
Once that is done, the
playfield is ready for the Colorspan 9840uv printer. The
playfield is screwed down onto a plywood frame for stiffening, and run
through for printing.
The Colorspan 9840uv flatbed printer.
The resulting product is shown in the image below.
The printed playfield at the next step: white letters.
One problematic aspect
of the Space Shuttle playfield is that it has white lettering in two
places: one in the U-S-A inserts at the top of the playfield, and the
second are the "Space Shuttle" words around the center
medallion. These are applied after the Colorspan has printed
the artwork, and is done by masking and respraying with the white
Krylon paint. The image below shows the finished
playfield. It is now ready for clearcoating to protect all
the paint layers.
The printed playfield as
shown at
Pinball
Expo 2007.
Note the misalignment of the "USA" inserts at the top.
Unfortunately, at this
point in the experimental process, John hit a big snag. When
the above playfield was clearcoated with automotive clear, the UV ink
was affected, and the print was damaged.
The solution was to first clearcoat the UV print with water-based
Varathane, and then applying the automotive clear. This
mishap was a blessing in disguise as the first print had a
misregistration at the top of the playfield (near the "USA"
inserts). Since the application of the white masking is a
separate manual process, it is possible to get misregistrations between
that and the color layers.
I sent John another file with the top part skewed over (based on photos
of the above), and the reprint did not have the problem (composite
photo below).
12/09 update. I adjusted the artwork and John reprinted
the playfield. Registration is now much better.
Click
image for full size version.
With the printing done,
John was able to perform the clearcoating without problems this time,
and after almost three years of waiting, I finally received the
playfield on April 23, 2010. The pictures below show how nice
it looks.
First, the clearcoat layer is excellent. John did a good job
with the auto clear.
In
his
words, this is the process that John used:
Sanded playfield gets 2 coats varethane, mask & spray
white auto acrylic
white high gloss (rattle can Sherwin Williams), 2 coats varethane,
printer inks with color span 9840uv printer, 3 coats varethane,
& 2
coats of finish DuPont!
Here is the middle of the
playfield. The quality of the print is excellent.
Very sharp and
clear. The entire playfield is wonderfully flat with no edges
on the inserts.
I am quite proud of the artwork file that was printed.
Sections of the playfield. Click for full res version.
The two playfields side-by-side. Click for full resolution.
(Note the autographed plastics on the machine).
For now, the playfield will be used as artwork for display in my home.
It just looks really good.
I
want to thank John Greatwich for his perseverance, dedication and
hard
work during this experiment. He has produced a means to
restore
playfields to their original appearance using modern
technology.
The result is a beautiful playfield.
Project
Log
- July 28, 2007 - Sent old playfield and file to John for
printing.
- July 2009 - It has been two years, and John has hit a snag
with the quality of printing and the registration accuracy.
He has now moved onto printing glass for backglasses. It
appears this printing process is not viable.
- December 2009 - John has decided to try again with Direct
Ink onto playfields.
- April 2010 - I finally receive my playfield back from John,
and it has been beautifully restored.
Another
Approach: Playfield Remake
Another company, located
in Canada, has jumped into the playfield renovation process, and has
started to actually
remake
new playfields, backglasses, and plastics. They are
Classic Playfield
Reproductions, and have produced playfields such as Black
Knight, and Xenon. One innovative idea that they have is to
allow
anyone outside the company to submit artwork.
Everyone benefits : the outside participants get compensated for their
work, CPR gets to sell the product, and the community has these
valuable pieces available.
Artwork is submitted in vector format, instead of raster.
This allows artwork to be infinitely enlarged without
problems. A common software for this is Adobe
Illustrator. Since my knowledge of this software was poor, I
decided to join forces with
Cameron
Jensen, and we started to redraw the Space Shuttle
playfield.
The playfield is printed with the authentic silk screening
method. This allows very saturated inks to be used with the
'true' color. This is superior to "process color" methods
used by four color ink printers (such as the Colorspan
9840uv). As a result, the artwork needs to redrawn in
separate layers, each layer representing one screen. Our
artwork file has over ten layers, and includes the calibrated Photoshop
file. Having this latter file made the redraw process much
easier, and we surprised Kevin Wayte (from CPR) with the speed of our
progress.
Animated GIF showing the
various layers of the Illustrator file.
The pink layer represents the bare playfield.
The above animated GIF
shows the various layers. The layer representing the bare
playfield wood plank is pink/fuschia. As a result, at the end
of the printing process, the remaining pink areas is then exposed
inserts and bare wood.
The layers are printed from light to black, and are as follows:
- Pink - the bare wood
- White
- Light Yellow - for the areas under the plastics and the
main ramp.
- Yellow
- Light Blue
- Light and Dark Grey - combined into one layer here for file
size
- Orange
- Red
- Dark Blue - mainly the sky in the lower playfield
- Black - the upper playfield space background, and all the
artwork lines.
Note that the artwork creation process needs to take into account the
potential slight misregistration of layers. As a result,
colors 'undercut' each other to avoid gaps that would erroneously show
the bare wood. Each of the layers are therefore hand drawn.
One area of considerable effort was what I called the 'gradient
dots'. This was of some difficulty in the overlay as well,
and Cameron was able to find a way to define a series of dots with
increasing size. This ballooned the size of the Illustrator
file from ~2MBytes to 8MBytes, but there is no other way to transition
color gradually when using silk screening as the printing
method. This is shown in time image below. Each
object has been 'selected' causing an outline of it to
appear. One can see that the dots are individual circles in
the file.
Close zoom of the ball lock area shows that the gradient dots are
individual objects. This drastically increased the size of
the file.
In the Fall of 2011, the playfields started to be printed.
This is an image
of the layers without black.
Click here for a
YouTube
video of Space Shuttle being printed (Sept 2011).
Mike at CPR posted the following note on 9/14/11 regarding their
progress:
Ok, it''s not exactly a Hollywood Blockbuster but we
think it's pretty cool. Space Shuttle seemed like a cursed PF.
The original holes were cut slightly too small which meant none of the
inserts fit. Each and every PF had to have each and every insert hole
and GI bulb hole sanded out by hand using a dremel. We went through
nearly 400 3/8" little sanding drums! Then we had many of the lips the
inserts sit on cut to the incorrect depth, too deep and the inserts
slipped below the surface and had to be removed and replaced. Too high
and the drum sander basically sheared them off and they had to be
removed and replaced. Lots and lots of removing and replacing! There
were hundred of inserts that had to be replaced along the way and that
was after each and every hole had to be size corrected!! In all there
were hundreds of hours spent fixing these cutting errors. But
the nice thing is that we have encountered all these problems before on
previous PFs but other than Flight 2000 we had never seen these
problems in these numbers! Our past experience allows us to repair
almost anything that happens to a PF because, well because you have to.
The wood is dear and the inserts that are glued in properly cannot
easily be replaced from the maker so you MUST fix the PFs or lose
them.
Anyway they turned out SWEET!
|
In
the middle of March 2012, I received the finished playfields, and was
very happy with the result. Kevin at Classic Playfields
produced
a special 'white' version with the Commemorative Space Shuttle logo
design.
Left: Direct Ink. Middle: Screened playfield.
Right: Screened 'white' version.
This is a close-up of the medallion with the
Space
Shuttle Commemorative design.
Above: Screen snap of CPR's webstore page.
Click image for the photo gallery
I received this playfield and signed it for the purchaser.
March 2020, Eric posted this
on FB at the time of install.
How do the various restoration methods compare? Here is my
opinion:
Method
|
Pro
|
Con
|
Cost
Range
|
Overlay
|
-Lowest Cost.
-Due to one-pass printing, layers will not have misalignment.
|
-Not directly
printed on playfield
|
$100 - $200
|
Direct Ink
|
-Lowest cost for
non-overlay process
-No change in location of inserts and posts due to an original
playfield being used.
|
-Need to completely
strip playfield including all parts, wires, and fasteners.
-Process in development.
|
$600
|
New Playfield
|
-Most original
restoration and the best looking colors.
|
-Playfield swap
requires completely removal of all parts, including wires and fasteners.
-Highest cost.
|
$600 - $800
|
Project
Log
- July 5, 2008 - Start of construction of vector Illustrator
files from bitmap Photoshop files.
- August 30, 2008 - Files completed and submitted.
We now await the playfield to be made.
- July 17, 2009 - Kevin sends me an e-mail asking me the
exact size of my playfield (41 7/8" x 20 3/8"). They are
placing the order for the wood.
- August 19, 2010 - Website
shows orders for Space Shuttle have closed and that it will
be the next to be made.
- September, 2011 - Kevin is printing the playfields and sent
me a photo of the status.
- October, 2011 - Playfields are shipping. See the gallery.
What a nice result.
- 15 March, 2012 - I received three playfields from Kevin.
One is the commemorative 'white' edition.
Page 1 of the Space Shuttle Playfield project here
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(c) 2010 Edward Cheung, all rights reserved.