[Jukebox-list] Flecking an AMI F or G Series Cabinet

[Aaron Heverin]

Hi David
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 his 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.

Dave, unless you're loving that yellow, please consider painting your G-200 Firecracker Red. Here's some pictures of an F and a G I did in both the red and coral. Unfortunately, the Coral F pictures were taken with a very cheap digital camera and the pictures are not very sharp.

www.buffalohistoryworks.com/ami

Aaron Heverin