Recently I was lucky enough to snag a good deal on a Gottlieb Lawman from 1971. I have been on the lookout for a decently priced Atlantis for a while, so when I saw this come up, I said good enough and would look nice along with some of my other western themed EMs.
First observations:
Cabinet - painted an ugly blue color, but seemingly pretty structurally sound.
Playfield - Terribly dirty, but really no dramatic paint loss to speak of, luckily.
Backglass - Mostly good but has some flaking on the leg and some fading on the well dressed lady to the side. All else looks good.
Mechanics - Present, but not pretty. A few replacement wires here and there, but upon doing a quick plug replacement and turning it on, a game did start, reels all rest, and most (or rather, many) things worked.
The Plan:
Cabinet - I'm excited that this one is totally wrecked paint wise, because I'm excited to strip it down and start from scratch. No "this will be good enough and won't bother me" attitude. It NEEDS to be changed.
Playfield - I am planning on completely stripping the playfield, cleaning it furiously, getting it pretty, and doing my best at the "vid's playfield restoration" guide using a Spraymax setup rather than a gun and mixing my own clear. I will have lots of questions for all of you along the way.
Backglass - I could live with the backglass, but I will start a search for a NOS or a better condition one than this. If I feel its necessary, I may hit up BGResto to do a reproduction.
Mechanics - Do a spotless shop job, obviously.
Since this will be my first job, this will NOT be a restoration thread where I will be waving my flag around looking for attention. I will be doing a lot of asking for your opinions and a lot of (safe) trial and error. I will accept and take any criticism or suggestions to my work at any time during this process. I look forward to it actually.
I'm posting this thread before I've done almost anything so I can stick to my plan and get working on some opinions.
Giddy up partner. Let's do this.
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