A couple of weeks ago there was an ad close to us for a players condition Taxi that was reasonable. Even though Taxi is a great game, and our game room is already quite full, Chrissi and I decided to take a chance with it so we got it with the intention of just cleaning it up. This is not going to be a full blown restoration like we did on our Grand Prix. (Fun Fact: Taxi was originally going to be Grand Prix II )

We got it home, installed a few LED's, and just played it a bit to see what it needs before it gets torn apart.

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Here you can see the discoloration of the unmylared areas. I'll try cleaning it up.
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All the boards are there. It had a remote battery, and some rework where a transistor melted a hole through the MPU. It's a decent repair that works.
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All the ramps are there, but filthy.
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Taking off all the plastics revealed just how dirty this poor taxi is. When I first saw this I honestly didn't think I'd be able to clean it up enough.
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One thing I always do is to run a magnet deep inside the cabinet to see what treasures await.
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This is what I found:
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I'll later discover where all these came from.

So now we get started on the clean up. First I vacuumed the entire playfield with a small brush attachment. Then I use Gojo and a toothbrush on the really skanky areas.
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To tackle the discoloration on the unmylared areas I just used a bunch of magic erasers with rubbing alcohol. It worked quite well. I stopped as soon as I saw that any further scrubbing would blast right through the paint.
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Next was buffing the mylar to get it to shine.
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I buffed the areas too narrow for the buffer by hand before it received two generous coats of carnuba wax.
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All the ramps were cleaned and buffed and laid in place temporarily.
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While I had the buffer out I did the cabinet and back box as well. It really made it shine!
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I removed and cleaned up the topper light board.
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Then reinstalled it with new bulbs.
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A new topper finishes it off.
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One of the issues I had was sometimes only half of the lights in the backbox would work. I traced it back to loose connectors on the interconnect board.
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I took it out to reflow the solder on all the header pins, and had to replace a couple.
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Then I took out the MPU to inspect the previous fix, and reflow all the headers.
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And finished it off with a new battery board. I really like the simplicity, and reliability of these.
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So far that's as far as I can go. Chrissi flattened and polished all of the plastics. All of the wireforms were cleaned, polished, and waxed and are ready to install. What's now holding me up is USPS juggling my Titan order between different distribution centers for the last 8 days. Some day it'll make it up here... I hope.

It's coming out pretty good I think. It'll be a great player once it's done.

I'm torn between buying new displays for it or fixing up the original one. The lower row is out.

Still tossing it around...

-Paul

I guess I can call this one done.

My Titan order finally arrived yesterday so I was able to put everything back together.

So many broken posts had to be replaced. In hindsight I probably should have just left them, but they were all bleached out and nasty.

It came out quite nicely.

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The only things left are to replace some of the plastics, and the display. For now it's a sweet shooter.

-Paul

Just a slight update:

Ordered a new departure ramp to replace my cracked one.

Installed new PinScore LED display kit. So far I'm really happy with it.

Ran into an issue with the Lola drop targets not consistently resetting. Pulled the opto board and cleaned them, and also reflowed solder on the header pins, and all is well.

We put about 50 games on it so far, and it's a great game!

-Paul

Meguires #105 with a foam pad. I also used it on the playfield as well. It just works way better than Novus for just about everything.

Thanks!

-Paul

You don't really need a buffer to get great results. In fact most of it was done by hand because the pad is way too big to get everywhere. The #105 will get the playfield nice and shiny, and the wax will protect it. Where the buffer work really well is on the factory mylar. It takes forever by hand and only seconds with it.

Good luck with your SOF!

-Paul

I used standoffs made from sections of vacuum tubing the same length as the original standoffs.

One thing I just noticed that I'm not too happy about with these PinScore LED's is that while the Jackpot Bonus displays correctly, the Meter Bonus is completely absent and doesn't display at all.

I remember reading about it some time ago, and should have paid better attention to it.

I'll have to do more research.

-Paul

I'm an idiot. I plugged the ribbon cable into the wrong header.
It's awesome now.

Thanks! We just got lucky in finding this one close to us.

Thanks John! We have new ramps arriving shortly. I'll be sure to post more pics of hem installed.

-Paul