Saving the playfield – Part 1
So, having ruined the playfield (see previous post) I opened a thread on flippermarkt.de to find out what the “experts” thought of my situation and how it could have happened (and how to repair the problem).
The main possible reasons given were:
- a dirty playfield
- the spray can or playfield were too cold
- a lack of pressure in the spray can
- a reaction to the original Diamond Plate
- clear-coat applied too wet
1 and 2 were definitely not applicable in my case. 3 might have been, but I doubted it. Because of the actual 1K used, 4 should also not have caused a problem. 5 I’m sure wasn’t the case.
So no help there then.
As a solution, nearly everyone recommended I remove the far inferior 1K clear-coat from the playfield and to use 2K instead. This would mean me having to either sand down the clear-coat to the original Diamond Plate, or (preferably) to use a solvent to remove the 1K. This would, of course, affect all of the touch ups I had done up until this time and would therefore not only take a lot of time, but cost me a lot of time already spent. So I decided not to follow these recommendations.
Instead, I decided to follow the advice that I let the clear-coat harden and then sand the playfield down slightly and then apply fresh coats of clear-coat. Through additional research, I determined that maybe I had actually sprayed the clear-coat on too dry (ie moved the spray can too fast across the playfield) which could easily be remedied by spraying a little slower. However, when spraying wet it is important to have a horizontal playfield (to prevent runs in the paint) and to ensure that each coat has a chance to breath (to let the solvent out) otherwise the solvent will be trapped and eventually force its way out as the coating dries resulting in small holes in the clear-coat surface.