I thought I would document my attempts at bringing a very sad looking Gottlieb Bronco back to life. I had been looking out for a project on eBay (UK) and saw this going for not a lot of money as well as being relatively local to me. As you can see I don't like an easy life.... The cabinet and back box need repairing, the back glass is shot and the play field has things growing on it. The electrics are in need of a really good clean and will probably need to be completely stripped in order to do a proper job. From looking at the documentation inside the machine and the coin door, it appears to have spent most of it's life in Germany, but somehow ended up in the UK.
Despite being new to pinball restoration I am fortunate to have my father in law to fall back on. He has many years of experience in servicing and restoration of EM machines. I put UK in the title as I hope that if I complete this and do a half decent job other UK pinball fans will find the thread useful. I look at the restoration threads all the time but struggle to find many of the products you guys in the states use. I will list the UK alternatives that I find.
I have taken some pictures below so you can see what will be the making or breaking of me!

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UPDATE: I decided to start off with the playfield as this area seems to be the worst. Surprisingly the inner workings of the backbox and the transformer board don't look to shabby. I have completely stripped the playfield of everything to allow me to give both sides the attention they need. Every single screw and bulb fitting was covered in rust.... I have built up quite a shopping list of replacement parts and will be replacing the majority of plastics, bulb fittings and playfield pats. After stripping the playfield I gave it a good clean using magic eraser with IPA and then Novus 2. It has come up much better than I thought it would. As you can see from the pictures there are still a lot of ball swirls I can't remove and some planking. It definitely needs touching up, however I am strongly considering making up some waterslide decals and repainting the whole thing.
I am now in the process of filling a few chips on the ends of the bottom side. Once these are dry I will sand and repaint it grey. IMG_0126 (resized).JPG

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It will come as no surprise, but the legs are off another machine . I've been wearing a mask so hopefully I won't keel over!

So after a good session with the sander, the bottom of the playfield was free from mold. I have repainted it following advice from Vid about having the playfield on two saw horses and painting from underneath to avoid paint dripping in the inserts. I have attached a before and after picture and I think we can all agree this looks much better! Some of the paint is still wet where I just had to finish the ends, but I think it gives it a fresh look. Definitely worth doing if you strip the playfield.

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