Playfield edge rails

Here's another changeover that I opted to do in the playfield swap, the side rails.   All playfields have them,  they perform a couple duties.  One is the obvious job of keeping the pinballs on the playfield,  in areas not covered by rubbers or other playfield features.  The other is they strengthen the playfield, to prevent it from bowing and twisting.   Unfortunately, they're also pretty cheaply made during that era (I have no idea what newer machines have).   The original part is just some cheap soft wood wrapped in a woodgrain vinyl.   Now, seriously, how creative is that?  Wood, wrapped in woodgrain vinyl?  They could have at least gotten creative with some colors or patterns there, if they just had to do the vinyl.  They're made cheaply, and didn't wear so well over the past 30 years.  So I opted for something a big nicer.

After some careful consideration, I decided that I wanted to use white oak.  It's a hardwood, so it should be able to take the impact of a pinball at least as well as the original crappy stuff it's replacing.  But it also matches the color tone well compared to what the woodgrain vinyl tried to look like. I picked up some beautiful white oak strip stock from a local mill,  Old World Moulding, in Bohemia, NY.  Not cheap stuff, but if you want quality you have to pay for it,  and I'm very happy with what I got.  The only problem was that it's not QUITE exactly the same size.   They could have custom made some pieces to the exact size I needed, but it would have really driven up the cost.  What I ended up with was very slightly thinner, and about 3/8" taller. 

Not a problem!  I made up a quickie little jig in my tablesaw, and ripped it down to the correct height.  So this photo shows the original stuff on the left,  the new oak in the middle before I cut it down, and post-cut on the right.  The graining on this stuff is beautiful, don't you agree?   Top quality stuff here.

Now, being a hardwood, you need to be careful about splitting it, so you need to drill pilot holes.  I also needed to counter-sink the screw heads into the backside of the playfield too.  Easy stuff, not time consuming, but absolutely critical that it's done.  I couldn't find exact replacements for the original screws,  so I re-used what I had as much as possible.  Don't even think about driving these screws in with a screwgun either.  Take your time, do it by hand, with a good screwdriver. 

I did a temporary install first, to make sure it was going to work, as it is about 1/8" thinner.  Here's a comparison of that test fitting, which also shows just how bad the old stuff was.  I hadn't done any treatment of the new wood yet either.

Here's a top view of the shooter lane that I took, which shows off the different grain patterns.  It's kinda hard to see, I know.  The darker grey stuff is the old vinyl,  with the new oak all the way on the right and left sides.  Between that is the playfield wood.  At this point I had given the oak a shot of Krylon matte clear,  I didn't want to make it all super-glossy and spoil the graining.   You can really see the width difference here too,  but after careful inspection I feel that it's going to be just fine.

And now a nicer view to show off the oak on its own.  I'm really happy with this choice.  It's just a shame how much of it will get covered by the upper playfield, plastics, rubbers, posts, etc...

And an overview shot with it all sitting in the cabinet for now.  I always put it in there for safe keeping when not working on it.  I haven't done the upper playfield yet as you can see.  You'll probably spot that a bit of hardware is installed already too,  but that's for a future post.