Loogootee, IN
What did you do around the pop bumpers? I have that same problem of wear around them for one I'm trying to restore. Looks like a piece of mylar around them and painted underneath? I haven't attempted to remove that yet. I have no idea how I would restore that fine red line on the outside. Any suggestions would be great.
Quoted from oliviarium:Some of what we were starting with and during the process. Already removed the inserts on the playfield, there were universally awful.
We covered up much of the star field repainting black in various areas -- we created it by hand where needed. The before shots don't show how yellowed the white text was, we ended up replacing all of that. We kept the faded color for the stars, even color matching it to recreate them, rather than attempting to recreate all of them.
One big lesson learned -- we didn't use the right clear. Also if we do this again we'll probably outsource that step. We got the safety protocols right, but ended up using a product that was a bit too hot and lead to some minor imperfections. The surface plays well, looks good in arcade conditions, but if you get close you'll see that we did fall short of many of the perfectly smooth mirror finishes you see all over the restore threads here.
There were also some things we did pretty well. The recreation of the detail like the center explosion, asteroid fragments, etc. came out way better than we had hoped for. We had some problems in applying waterslides that we were able to overcome (black on insert decals, even with laser printer at the highest toner use settings let too much light through on the black, but we were able to double them up. The reverse printed decals we created for white text were a disaster, but we were able to reverse print them on the clear and use un-printed white underneath to get a good result, much better than if we had attempted to hand paint to correct missing white text).
We had to build a new neck, as that was just gone... used our Firepower as a guide, that came out pretty well.
We also used the fonts we downloaded for the playfield to print up some new instruction cards -- we like to take some creative license on the stuff we rebuild in ways that could be easily reversed in the future.
All in all, we feel pretty good about taking what probably should have been a parts machine and ending up with a decent players-quality game. We probably spent more in time and money than it would have taken to buy a working machine, but we learned a great deal that will be helpful in maintaining our collection, so all goals achieved![quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
