For my first restoration thread (and the first machine I've ever had professionally restored), I'd like to do something a little different. Rather than make several posts with a few pictures sprinkled in - I'd like to show everyone what the entire restoration process is like from start to finish. There were a few emails exchanged at the beginning, but the remainder were texts and pictures (over 300 pictures!). Since Pinside limits a post to 8 pictures, I elected to create a single page on my website with all of the texts/emails/pictures in the order they were sent and presented in a conversation format.

I had never spoken with Bryan before this project, but after working with him and meeting him in person at Expo, I can tell you he is the real deal - incredibly nice, humble and super talented. I'm jealous of those lucky enough to live near him and hang out with him on a regular basis. I thoroughly enjoyed the entire process and will not hesitate to use him again on another restoration.

I'll post a few "after" pictures in this post, but feel free to post any of the pictures from my webpage in this thread.

The webpage is located here:

http://www.damonator.com/pinball/creature/creature.html

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Someone asked - the full cost breakout of the restore is included at the end of the page.

I used iBackup Extractor to pull the messages - but unfortunately you can't specify what size to extract the pictures as...and the default option is to pull tiny little pictures. I had to extract all the images from the conversation, resize and re-insert them one by one.

If anyone has used another tool that allows you to specify the image sizes (or pulls them as full resolution), I would love to use that in the future.

FWIW - he offered his left nut in exchange for the speaker panel to be used in the next Creature in his queue.

It took me quite a while to find the chrome speaker panel (thanks Stu) and LED speaker panel mod (thanks Gordon). At least one of the mods hasn't made it to production yet - the LED Ramp Chase board by Bill Ung... but the prototype I'm using is working really well. GI OCD makes a *huge* difference on this game, but the factory ramp chase board isn't compatible.

I don't think my costs are representative - in fact I think it's the most expensive restore he's done. It's my wife's favorite title so I wanted to put as many tasteful mods in it as possible.

My guesstimate is that a basic restore without so many mods would run $6-$7k on top of the game cost.