Pony MK 2 18 Adventures

[eczangief]

Deep cleaning of the Pony glass went south when the paint began to lift from the interior of the glass. Not the biggest deal because it was in sorry shape to begin with. In retrospect, the ease with which the paint was disturbed explains the plague of random black specks that I’ve suffered on the inside of the glass, over the playfield. I’d clean the glass of dust and debris whenever I rotated the tube, and without fail there’d be annoying (and hard to remove) dots marring the glass. Turns out it was bits of paint falling and getting baked back onto the glass. I digress.

5 years ago I would have had a brief moment of dread, but having children has beaten that out of me. Instead I switched from a spray bottle and a rag to a flat razor and went to work removing the rest of the paint.

The wide strips left and right are approx. 1 and 5/8” or 4cm. The narrow margins are 5/8” or 1.7cm. The measurements were slightly off amongst each border, but those are very close. There was evidence of a curve to meet the two margins in only one of my corners, the rest had sloughed off before the machine came into my possession.

Here’s my pisspoor tracing of it:

My first thought was to tape off the design and spray it with matte black, but it will not be spray paint weather for awhile around here. I figured vinyl wouldn’t be too difficult to apply and then carefully cut out the margins and the curve that joined them.

At this point I realized that the narrow margins were totally obscured by the cabinet metal (lip of the CP and the upper housing where the top of the glass is set into). Armed with this revelation, I decided to simply adhere two vertical stripes of matte black vinyl to the glass and be done with it.
I went with Make Market brand permanent vinyl. Cheap stuff, 7usd for a 1x4’ roll.

Never been more proud of a straight edge.

The trained eye will observe that it really isn’t my machine anymore. We’ll see how the rugrats like Dad’s work in the morning.

 

[eczangief]

While we’re at it, I also had solved the problem of the marquee holder on this machine, a month or so ago. My Pony came with a header that was branded ‘Oslo’ (iirc) and the slats for the marquee above did not match that of the conventional Pony 18 marquee holder.

The mounting screw holes were in the proper place so it was really only a matter of cutting the opening to size in order to accept the marquee holder.

I laid down some heavy tape to protect the header/light box top, a straight edge in line with the area to be cut.

Not pictured, slow and steady dremel work with a cutting wheel. I left the ‘fingers’ on the extreme left and right ends of the slot and bent these at an angle to help seat the marquee edges in firmly (it was also simpler this way, of which I’m a fan). I also rigged up two standoffs with rubber washers to allow me to secure the marquee holder. The black bit down low is tape to hold a pair of smaller standoffs together to make up the height.

And done.