Mercifull
Registered
RetroRefurb replica plastics are clearly the best... but no plastic set for JP teary face #hinthint
Pinball info
Register a free account today to become a member! Once signed in, you'll be able to participate on this site by adding your own topics and posts, as well as connect with other members through your own private inbox!
Reproduction plastics
- Thread starter scottniven
- Start date
Was in the process of making those when CPR released theirs and so many people got burnt. Wanted to wait a couple of years before going back to them. Maybe it's nearly time.
Mercifull
Registered
I almost bought a set from CPR (I even created a thread on this forum looking for people to join a group purchase to save on the shipping costs) but then someone I knew said they had a set from ages ago and they were "pants". He no longer had the machine so I couldn't vouch for the opinion but it put me off enough not to order.
Starship troopers in the pipeline at all ?
Yes actually ha! Maybe around summer though.
Mercifull
Registered
@PeteB
If you ever run earthshaker plastics give me a shout! I have cpr ones because i thought they was silk screened but they are printed and colours are a bit grainy if you look closely. Deffo better then broken ones but would love much sharper / raw flat colours like the original silk screen ones
Regards
Russell
If you ever run earthshaker plastics give me a shout! I have cpr ones because i thought they was silk screened but they are printed and colours are a bit grainy if you look closely. Deffo better then broken ones but would love much sharper / raw flat colours like the original silk screen ones
Regards
Russell
AlanT
Registered
These do indeed look *really* good - but from Pete's description of the process it doesn't seem like it would ever be possible to use it to repro all the thousands of plastics that have come and gone in the last - what - 70 years since they started to be used?
I wonder did the old pinball companies retain master copies of all their artworks? if they did, what happened to them as one by one the companies shut down or morphed into something else? I envisage warehouses of parts holdings and hundreds of document drawers containing master artworks that could be far more easily used to recreate plastics for thousands of different machines! Is that even a remote possibility? To - belatedly - break this cycle, maybe for all new pinball machines it should be a requirement that a set of digital masters of the plastics artwork be shipped out (on a CDROM or memory stick) with each new machine.
As to the run-of-the-mill reproductions... better than nothing, yes. Also, at the resolution Pete shows above, they are bound to look bad as compared to his fresh digital ground-up recreation - however, there are few (if any) ordinary circumstances under which you would look at them so close up, you always view them from at least a foot or two away. So rather like a TV picture, look too close and you will see defects, track back 2-3 feet and those lessen or dissappear. Though some examples of straight copied plastic above ARE pretty bad, the best of the straight copies are probably - as Pete says - "good enough" for the case where a crisp re-creation is not available and let's face it, that's going to be 98% of all the plastics ever made for the foreseeable future!
Now, who wants to sell me some lovely new plastics for my 1964 "Bowling Queen" - and where is that Gottlieb library holding the master copies :-D
I wonder did the old pinball companies retain master copies of all their artworks? if they did, what happened to them as one by one the companies shut down or morphed into something else? I envisage warehouses of parts holdings and hundreds of document drawers containing master artworks that could be far more easily used to recreate plastics for thousands of different machines! Is that even a remote possibility? To - belatedly - break this cycle, maybe for all new pinball machines it should be a requirement that a set of digital masters of the plastics artwork be shipped out (on a CDROM or memory stick) with each new machine.
As to the run-of-the-mill reproductions... better than nothing, yes. Also, at the resolution Pete shows above, they are bound to look bad as compared to his fresh digital ground-up recreation - however, there are few (if any) ordinary circumstances under which you would look at them so close up, you always view them from at least a foot or two away. So rather like a TV picture, look too close and you will see defects, track back 2-3 feet and those lessen or dissappear. Though some examples of straight copied plastic above ARE pretty bad, the best of the straight copies are probably - as Pete says - "good enough" for the case where a crisp re-creation is not available and let's face it, that's going to be 98% of all the plastics ever made for the foreseeable future!
Now, who wants to sell me some lovely new plastics for my 1964 "Bowling Queen" - and where is that Gottlieb library holding the master copies :-D
The pandemic slowed us down and screwed up my plastics manufacturing process but the intention is there to get through as many games as possible. The problem is acquiring ALL pieces in a set, because they're usually locked into a game and only odd pieces show up on used markets. When we have full sets, we can repro them record time.
We have a database and have been building a collection of used plastics. Several new sets are due to be made over autumn this year.
I also need to hire more people to get stuff like this done.