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FunHouse: Playfield Restoration

Restored in 2012. Here is a Funhouse that received a complete playfield restoration. Many games from this era had a Mylar protective film installed over the surface of the playfield to protect it from wear. The downside is that they become cloudy over time, develop bubbles, and generally do not age well. Stripping the Mylar, cleaning the glue residue, touching up, and clearcoating the playfield is a laborious process, but if everything goes right, the finished product can be spectacular!

Before gallery

If you look at this picture at a glance it looks OK, but if you enlarge it you can start to see the flaws.
In this picture you can clearly see the bubbles over many of the arrow shaped inserts in the circle.
There's not much you can do to make the playfield shine when you have a Mylar situation like this.
I had some bad luck removing Mylar in the past using the heat method, so I wasn't too enthused about attempting to remove it. I decided to attempt removing the Mylar using a method of freezing it off. By using freeze spray, you can remove the Mylar and it leaves the glue, and hopefully all the paint on the playfield.
The Mylar in the pop bumper area will also be removed. The freeze method worked great, only down side was that I used about 5 cans, more than I thought I would need.
Now it's time to strip all the parts from the playfield, that means everything! Now is a good time to take lots of pictures and keep all your parts organized.
With the playfield out of the machine and standing on the floor, I used the freeze spray on the old Mylar until it practically fell off, luckily I did't see any paint coming off with it. I decided to buy a new playfield in case things didn't go well, but at this point I'm hoping I won't need it.

After gallery

Now the Mylar is completely off, and all the parts have been completely removed from the playfield. I carefully removed all the glue using a combination of goo gone and orange power.
Varathane has been applied, block sanded and buffed, I got to try out my new Makita rotary buffer and right now I'm thinking it was money well spent!
After the clear-coat cures for a while you can start putting all the parts back on. I decided to line the holes with stainless steel protectors. I had a spare NOS trap door I decided to use on this project. The pop bumper parts are all new.
It's so much better now without the Mylar and the playfield has a mirror-like shine on it.
Now is the time you want to pay attention to details and clean, polish and replace all the playfield parts your putting back on.
I replaced one of the ramps because the plastic was cracked at the entrance. Other than that, all the plastic parts on this machine are original.
All of the original playfield parts on this machine were in great shape, in this case I was lucky to start out with a fairly low mileage example.
And now the machine looks and plays like new and will bring someone years of enjoyment.
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