mechanicalarcade.com
Cabinets

Clown Bartender

There were many conversion kits available for the Ray-O-Lite Chicken Sam game by Seeburg. Many of these are lost to time and even advanced collectors have not seen some of the conversions that were not advertised in major magazines. Many operators also made their own conversions. All it took was a new figure, either 3d or 2d, and a painted background.

I have already documented one shoot-the-bartender project, but I have found another figure.

This figure looks very different from the one I previously had. I also have no idea what background went with this figure. If you have a photo of it, please send it my way.

I have dubbed this figure the Clown Bartender for his ourageous costume.

When I received this figure, he had a spare head.

The head on the figure and the spare were cast from plaster. The body is cardboard or possibly paper machet pushed into a form.

He was hand painted and suffered some damage around the lenses.

Redheaded on one side and brunette on the other.

Here I am preparing to cast the figure. I have my casting box built to size just as in my other projects.

Here I have my figure in the molding rubber.

The faces on both original figures were damaged from years of being thrown around in storage.

You can see what the inside looked like. A wood circle was nailed in place for mounting but it came out long ago.

This is the extra head. It is a little worse than the one on the body but could be restored.

You can see how the body was damaged around the lenses.

Here are my final castings in plastic.

They need some clean up and sanding on the bottom to make them flat. I also used plastic putty to fill in any gaps or holes and to smooth the lens areas out.

I painted the figures white because it was a good base coat for my colors and the original figure was mostly white.

On the right is the original figure, left my painted copies.

Again, the original compared to my painted copies.

I noticed the original beer mugs had foam areas that were raised. Apparently the person painting my copy did not notice this and painted those yellow. My versions keep the foam sections white like they were originally intended so my mugs have a different foam pattern.

All of the castings are now painted. I tried to match the rough style of the original as closely as possible.

If you need more details on how I cast this figure, see my other casting projects where I go into more details.