How

to

Paint

Your




Aaron Heverin was active for many years on the jukebox mailing list. He restored many AMI F and G series jukeboxes at a shop in the old Wurlitzer building on North Tonawanda, New York. The machines he restored looked like they'd just rolled off the factory floor. He spent a lot of time and effort backwards-engineering the process for producing the speckled paint finish, and shared that information with members of the mailing list. Here are excerpts from some of his emails that I saved. (I claim no copyright to this information.)




The toothbrush is a way to go if you were going to cover a small area, but that would take weeks to do a full size cabinet like an AMI F or G. This is the method I use...but remember that it is just as time consuming, and you MUST practice on a scrap sheet of plywood before you do this to your cabinet. Make sure your scrap is painted the same color as your cabinet before you proceed with practicing.

Get yourself a short-bristled wallpaper brush. They are about 12 inches long and the bristles are only about 3/4" or so high. You want a brush that is stiff but will still hold a fair amount of paint...but NOT an amount that will cause huge splatters. You'll also need a plastic trough or pan that's as long as the brush.

An Atoll Coral AMI has two colors of fleck: a light tan, and black. Do the tan first. OH! Before you do any of this, make 100% sure that your cabinet is completely dry from any repainting that you do. When I restore these things, I make sure to give the cabinet at least 4 days to completely dry before I put on fleck. I'll explain why in a minute.

Pour a line of the tan paint into the trough that's about HALF the length of the brush. Dip the brush into the paint and gently swish and push the brush around so that the bristles are good and coated with the paint. You only want half of the brush covered with the tan paint. Shake off any excess paint back into the trough. Now take the brush and wack it down on a sheet of newspaper to remove any thick globs of paint that accumulated on the brush. You DON'T want huge splotches of paint...just small flecks. Big splotches will run and drip and you want to avoid that. You also don't want so much paint on the bristles that you won't be able to control where it goes once you start flecking. BELIEVE ME....you'll see the paint go flying in the next step so very little paint is better than way too much. You just want to get paint on and in the bristles...you don't want to get it pooled up.

You may want to have latex gloves on for the next step. After you've removed a good amount of the paint from the brush - and here's where you need to practice to develop your technique and get a feel for what's going to happen - start flecking the paint on by rubbing your index finger - or thumb against the brush - pulling TOWARD your body - directing the splatter onto the cabinet. Work from the outside bristles of the brush back to the middle. You'll be able to tell when there's no more paint left on the bristles and it's time to reload. You'll have to learn how to position the brush, your finger, and your thumb in relation to the lines and curves of the cabinet to achieve a good uniform result. For example, if you shoot the fleck at the rounded corners of the top of the cabinet, and you have the brush almost completely level with the top of the cabinet itself, you're going to get what I call a "zinger." That's a fairly long thin streak of paint that will resemble a comet. While small zingers look cool, LOTS of them look horrible. So practice, practice, PRACTICE!!!

You also want to have a Q-Tip, lightly damp with water, handy while your doing this because if you get a blotch that looks awful, or too big, you can use the Q-Tip to soak up some of the paint, or wipe the blotch away entirely. Remember how I said to make sure your cabinet is completely dry before you put on the fleck? Well, you actually have a small margin for error when doing this step because you'll be able to wipe away any small areas of imperfection in the fleck without removing any of the main cabinet color.

You'll also discover that by the time you get done flecking one side of the cabinet, the previous side you flecked will be almost dry. Let the tan dry for about an hour before you move on to the black, which you'll apply exactly the same way. Only this time, use the OPPOSITE side of the brush - just make sure you wash the brush before you proceed with the black coat.

1) Stay at least a foot or more away from the cabinet when you're doing this. If you get too close, you'll accumulate too much fleck in one area. You want the covering to appear random.

2) The harder you flick your fingers and thumb over the brush, the more paint you'll flick off the brush and the results will be bigger flecks - until the brush goes almost completely dry...in which case you'll wind up with very tiny flecks. Watch big splotches because they will drip. Try to get a mixture of both big and little flecks. Too much of the little flecks will drastically alter the overall color of the cabinet. Practice to get a good mix. Be artistic. You are in complete control as to how this will look so take your time.

3) The rails on the back of the cabinet will need to be flecked too, but because they are curved, getting a uniform covering is difficult. Get within 4 inches of the rails with your brush and flick very slowly. You don't want too big of an area with NO fleck on it.

4) The top dome is done separately. Remove it from the cabinet and paint and fleck it by itself. Watch the curves.

5) If you DO get a large splash of paint that looks ugly, you may be able to take a very fine paintbrush and do some artistic manipulation of the splotch so that it looks a bit more pleasing. I've done this many times where I've painted hundreds of splotches by hand simply because I wanted something not as uniform as what was coming off the wallpaper brush.

6) Make sure you get a uniform coat of the tan, before you proceed to the black. You CAN'T go back and redo the tan once you start the black because the color blend will be off. You'll have to paint flecks on top of each other manually if you make a mistake and have to go back and redo any of the tan flecks.

7) Oh...NEVER...NEVER do any of this with an oil base paint. Clean-up is impossible as is correcting any mistakes.

Once you are finished with the flecking, you won't believe that the cabinet was the same thing you started out with. Once flecked, the cabinet just JUMPS out at you and screams the 1950s. One of the Atoll Coral AMI Fs I restored wound up in an ice cream parlor. It was wild to see it in action especially once it was completely reassembled and lit up. I can send you pictures if you like. After everything is dry - and I give it 2 days or so...I then spray 6 coats of clear-coat on the entire cabinet.

You'll also notice that by flecking the tan and black on the cabinet in this way, you'll achieve the exact same results that AMI did when they sprayed the colors suspended in lacquer - a slightly bumpy finish. This finish will begin to smooth over the more coat of clear finish you apply.







This page from a G-series brochure shows the eight color combinations available on the F and G series machines



More notes:

Fri, Jan 22, 2010:

I used to do restorations with a guy that was on a route for AMI in the 50s and he told me that out of the 7 or 8 colors that AMI produced for the F and G series, only the black version got the gold flake rather than the speckle finish. Now having seen cabinets in the yellow, coral, red, blue, green, light tan, and black style...I can only assume that what he says is true to law. I have a black F in the shop awaiting restoration that has the gold glitter on it and I thought it was a 1970s repaint / hack-job done by a previous owner. It wasn't until I got this G-200 that I'm currently restoring that's ALSO black with the gold flake that I realized that what was told to me may indeed be true. In all honesty, it's ugly.... but that's probably because I'm looking at a finish that's 50 years old and coming apart. The customer didn't want the gold flake put back on the machine... instead electing to have speckle put on in grey and red! It looks really cool. I'll have to post some of the pictures for the list to see as I've begun to put everything back together.

At one time, I had access to several different Fs and Gs in various colors. I took notes on all the color schemes even though I swore I would only restore in two colors no matter how much a customer pleaded with me... that yellow is just wayyyyyyyy too much. :-)

Based on what I saw, I found that:

The Coral had grey and brown flecks

The Light Tan had grey and brown flecks

The Red had grey and black flecks

The Blue had grey and black flecks

The Yellow had grey and black flecks

The Green had grey and black flecks

IMHO.... the red is the most striking color that this jukebox could be done in. Once everything is complete, nothing screams 1950s ice-cream parlor than an F or a G done up in the red. The funny thing is, it doesn't come together until the speckle is added. After that's done, you just stand back and go

"WOW!"

More Information:

Fri, Jan 22, 2010

First thing is prime the cabinet after everything has been corrected with the wood and veneer. After that, paint the cabinet red. Let it dry for several days. Then apply the grey fleck and let it dry. Then apply the black fleck. Let it dry. Then put on about 6 or more coats of gloss clear-coat. The cabinet will look like plastic when it's done. Believe me!

Again, I could write a book about the entire process due to the experiences I've had with doing this... so a phone call may be the best thing. One piece of advice..... if you're going to apply a gloss clear-coat on cabinet (which I recommend), don't buy a gloss red paint... and don't use Dutch Boy or Sherwin Williams paint (IMHO). Use an eggshell finish. You should also try to find a "furniture grade" paint... one that is made to be handled or trod upon with regular use. I only use a Muralo paint for my F and G restorations.




Some Background:

Thu, Feb 22, 2007

I actually NEVER did the green, the light blue, or the yellow. When I started working on these things, I had quite a few of them in a warehouse from which to pick and choose to restore. After taking a look at the yellow and green, I made an oath that I would try to keep as far away from those two colors as possible. I actually had a customer come to me wanting the yellow but I played it smart. Before I spent $60 on a single gallon of the paint, I had a small pint made up. I had a local paint shop where colors were matched by the eyes and skill of the proprietor. I removed a piece of wood from the yellow cabinet and had the paint guy match it. It was DEAD on. He even took into consideration how the paint on my sample would have aged over 50 years...so the color he came up with was vibrant!!!

I took this pint and sprayed it on a 5 x 4 piece of plywood that I sanded smooth. I then flecked it grey then black. After finishing it, all I could say was "Hmmmmmmm." I called my customer to look at it and he did the exact same thing...."Hmmmmmm." However, sitting right next to the yellow sample was a nearly finished F-120 that I had painted Firecracker Red. The customer freaked out on that and promptly told me to toss out the yellow.

Here's the rest of the story. I had a bad habit of not writing down the color codes of all of my custom jukebox paints. After doing so many, and always going back to the same paint guy to get the paint, I figured that since HE kept a file on me, he would always know my colors. I could simply call up and say that I need another gallon of Firecracker Red or Atoll Coral and within an hour, there it was. After a while, I DID write down the coral and red colors, but the yellow was lost...because one day, the veterinarian office located right next door to the paint shop decided to build a new complex. In doing so, they started to bulldoze their old building into the ground. Also in doing so, they weakened the wall that was shared with the vet's section of the building and the paint shop. So one day, the entire wall of the shop came crashing in, bringing most of the building down with it. The guy lost everything INCLUDING his files and the treasured notebook of paint formulas for hi s customers.

So now the only colors I have are for the red and coral. Which, by the way, is a heavy duty, furniture grade paint. It's designed to be on surfaces that will be handled, touched, or bumped into with regularity. It's a Muralo paint and it works very well through a sprayer as long as it's deluted slightly. The fleck colors I had on the yellow cabinet were grey and black.



Pictures and Description of an AMI Model F Restored by Aaron Heverin



Fri, Nov 14, 2008

Applying the flecking on the Red, and Coral cabinets is a snap because you're flecking with paint. I'm wondering how to do the fleck in glitter - which apparently is original to a few of the AMI F and G cabinets.

I think I put this up on the board before, but I DIDN'T go to Home Depot or Lowes to get my first can of Firecracker Red for an F I was restoring. I went to one of the few remaining paint stores in my area where the guy behind the counter was a color expert, and relied on his skill and knowledge of his tinting colors rather than with a computer. I had a small piece of the wood from the lower door frame that wasn't damaged by years of neglect and filth. I brought this piece to the paint guy and he studied it for several hours before he called me back and said he had a pretty good match...taking into consideration the age of the sample and how it may have looked when the paint was first applied back in 1954. He showed me half a dozen samples of what he came up with....and it wasn't samples painted on a small piece of paper with his thumb. He actually painted on a large piece of finished plywood, and we were able to come up with a dead-on match. He also worked with me on coming up with a formula to mix the paint with a "thinner" to allow it to be applied with a sprayer. Try THAT at Home Depot!

He did the same thing when I needed the Atoll Coral color.

So I have the formulas for both the Red and the Coral...but only for Muralo paint. But keep in mind that the base coat is only one part of finishing off the entire cabinet. There's the flecking and clear coat as well.