It's been on my mind now for a long time to document the long process of an amatuer refurb on a Fire Power I bought locally nearly 2 years ago with a pretty shot playfield, non-playing electronics, rusty legs, worn cab.. etc etc..

I will preface by saying that I will try to keep the synopsis short and support it with pictures I took throughout the process. My original intention in buying this machine was to tear it apart and use the cab what whatever I could to start building my own custom machine. At the time, my only experience was playing a Bally/Midway black belt when I was growing up that it still living in my parents basement (and still one of my favorites.. simple but great fun) and electronics/project experiance from school (I'm an EE grad). Suffice to say that I'm a complete am when it comes to restorations, and basically brand new to the hobby as of 2 years ago.

I am reluctant to share all my many mistakes but in the end I think it's good to still document this for other newbies considering jumping into restoration of any level. I think that I ended up with a pretty nice machine.. certainly not CQ but that was never my intention. I wanted to customize it, make it pretty to the eye and playable. I think I achieved these 3 things. I know there are plenty of people on here who like things kept original.. and perhaps if this machine was bought in better condition and I had taken the project on today that's what I would have gone for this one would have taken a new CPR playfield and a lot more work than I probably put into it.

I got most of my information for this from RGP. I switched over to pinside more recently within the last year and started to learn more about my mistakes once I did so. I'm certainly not as OCD as many of the more professional restorer's on here.. as I stated earlier, this is an amateur restore to get a game up from the grave, looking decent, and playing again. So.. with that introduction, I'll throw up some beginning pictures.

I picked up FP with no legs attached, told only GI was coming on when swiched on. I don't think I even bothered to ask to plug it in. I Brought it home, got everything hooked up and flipped the switch. As stated, the GI came on. And that was it.

Below are some pictures of what it looked like. I didn't really know where to go from there, but ended up using the bulletproofing and troubleshooting guide (clay? I believe.. been a while since I was at that stage) to start working through issues.

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I started by recording everything in a notebook regarding the issues I was seeing and everything I tried to fix those issues. It runs a good 8 pages before I suddenly get everything working electronically and a game going. I was stoked at this point.. I think it took a month or so at least. I won't go through the whole log.. but suffice to say for anything attempting this for the first time, when you receive a game in this condition and have no idea where to start it's a little daunting and I consider myself a little lucky in the end to not have to had to replaced all the boards because I didn't have any other known working boards to swap in to narrow down issues. Some things I DID do in the process of getting it running:

Repinned at least one connector. Replaced fuses, several blown transistors, a burned up coil, disconnected/reconnected coils, pulled driver board several times and eventually replaced it with a good one off ebay, ended up replacing master display board and 1 6-segment display, resoldered all the header pins with new, rebuild flippers, cleaned switch contacts & adjusted, did a LOT of reseating cables, jiggling wires, pulled CPU & sounds roms and reseated.. etc etc.

This began to get pretty frustrating. For a long with I would switch the game on and half or all the coils would start machine-gun firing and I would immediately turn it off again to avoid blowing another fuse. There were sound issues (first none, then missing certain parts). Switch issues, flipper issues, Trough issues...

*Finally* I happened to see a close up of a coin door online while I was looking at the switch tests (which took a while to even get to because the displays were half out due to the master display being messed up) and I noticed that the coin switch actuators on my machine were all 3 bent down and grounding out to the base of the coin door for some unknown reason. I bent them back to their correct positions and... FP booted up, and started a game! I was stoked!

I played some games, but honestly I realized it really needed some help.. all that bare wood and cupped inserts.. it didn't play all that great. At some point during this process (maybe even much earlier on) I shifted from wanting to tear it apart to build my own to realizing that I should start wayyy slower and instead work on getting this one running good and learning what I could along the way. Thus, I decided to try to refurbish this one best that I could. I don't have a workshop, but I do have an un-finished basement so that became the workshop.

I decided to strip the PF, repaint it, and clear it with varathane. I wanted to repaint the cab, tumble the metal parts, buff any larger metal, and put it all back together again. I decided that the pealing "wallpaper" used on the shoot lane and some of the wood sides on the PF needed to go and I went with a more black and red theme. The inside of the cab was pretty gross too so I painted it black with red highlights, and I eventually decided I didn't like the wood PF bracket system and installed a new hinge-system ALA what I had on my DE Time Machine which I purchased roughly halfway through this project.

First things first.. I began stripping the PF. I took a LOT of pictures (which I can't stress enough how invaluable these are because I was reassembling about a year or more later and I still had trouble even WITH all the pictures.) As I went, I bagged everything and labeled them. I tried to keep all the small assemblies together with their nuts, bolts, or screws. I had a ton of baggies when I finally pulled out the last pop bumper.

The rubbers were soo gone. Targets needed new decals very badly. Hot dog inserts looked like crap. Lots of ball wear. Pretty dirty all around, esp. under the apron!

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The pop bumpers are a bit of a pain and I left them to last. I resembled then with the same long metal leads which turned out to be one of many mistakes.. but I'll get there later on. One everything was stripped, I removed the mylar around the kickers and the pop bumpers. The kickers worked great with the freeze method and peeled right up, leaving only slight half-moons where they had been protecting the paint.

The pop pumpers were not so forgiving. 2 of them went ok. I got pretty frustrated during the other ones and ended up knicking up the paint pretty bad with the razor blade I was using. Note to self, use a plastic edge next time. But.... I was going to repaint anyway and this isn't a $7k game so I just rolled with it.

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I cleaned everything up best I could and I was left looking at a good deal of repainting.

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Various issues beyond bare wood - crazing & the fading of all the white from the wood tannins caused it to turn into more of a cream color. The missing red seemed pretty straight forward, but all the missing planet would take some time. Here's another shot of the fire hotdog insert showing how burnt up the lettering/paint is.

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Before I could start painting, I needed to get all the cupped inserts out. They were pretty bad.. when I was playing it the ball would easily get stuck in the bonus inserts from being so cupped. I didn't take any pictures of this process that I can find, but it just involved the heat gun, a hammer, a screwdriver, and a battery. I had to unscrew most of the lamp holders so I labeled in sharpie on the backside of the PF as I went along. The wires had good memory so this was probably not necessary but it made getting them back in the right spot easier.

Run the heat gun on the backside of the insert in a circular motion for 20 seconds until feeling warm on the topside of insert (hold fingers over it) to warm the glue, then for most of the inserts the battery was about the right size to place underneath them and tap them out with the hammer carefully. Especially carefully on the hotdog and triangular inserts. I think I had 1, possibly two circular ones that stuck and cracked part of the lower sections of them. I lucked out on the rest.

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Inserts removed, I was on to painting the PF. I think this is probably the beginning of mistakes that I wouldn't make again. I don't own an airbrush or have any idea how to use one. I did have plenty of paint brushes and some experience there.. so I decided to brush all the colors on after reading about it plenty. Again here.. not a $7k game and not a $14k restoration.. so I was ok with non-perfect results. I thought I could get rid of brush strokes by using paint thinner, as documented on the space shuttle restore (I think easily found online).

I got the PF setup horizontal and went to work.

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This quickly turned into a bigger project that I had anticipated back when I was just getting everything to work electronically. The planking in the black started to bother me so I tried filling the lines in and wiping the excess off. It turns out that there are a *lot* of different shades of black... who knew? I went to several art stores in search of all the acrylic blacks I could find. I tried mixing various ones.

It didn't really matter what I did, under a light the touch-ups still stood out when I let them try and rubbed naptha over under a light to see how clear would affect the final color blend. Finally I decided to completely repaint all the blacks, going back and then repainting all the stars on top. I found a very close match and went to work.

Around this same time, I think I decided to also redo all the faded white that I could. I was mostly looking at all the areas under plastics but this eventually turned into redoing the now cream lettering, and a lot of other touchups (down above apron)

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On the bare wood areas I starting with a white base and then went from there. (see above photo) The reds going to the targets were taped off and painted with a heavily thinned paint. This was one of the first things I did and it took a good 7 coats to cover everything. This served to slightly raise this area, although the brush strokes weren't really too visible. (again see above photo)

However, I didn't really want to put 7 coats down everywhere else considering the detail of some of these things so I stopped using so much paint thinner and went with one or two coats depending on the area I was painting. So.. here's the problem with brush painting and not laying down thin coats:

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Moving ahead.. after the base white and doing all the reds, I moved onto the planet. My thought was to reproduce the original with all it's glorious detail. I also wanted to match the formerly-white-now-creamywhite in the planet since repainting the entire thing was out of the question. I experimented with mixing colors to get a close match and laid it down first over my white base.

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As I mentioned, I was running naptha over the dried paint to color match a final product. Part of this method in mixing colors involved using clear flexible plastic which I would try various color combinations, let them dry, then lay it over the PF next to the color I was matching and run the naptha over both of them. This is detailed in other guides and worked well to match colors.

So here's my second mistake. Matching colors is tedious and I'm no master painter. I didn't quite capture the cream color.. but I laid down my closest match that I was willing to put the effort in to find. I thought that it would be covered mostly anyway and that would help blend it in. Then I went to work with the taped-up original PF for reference going color by color trying to get things in the correct place. This was a PITA! I gave up quickly and just started working on creating something that once finished, a casual player would not be able to tell that it was not actually what was originally present. Final result is here:

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Without clear, close-up I think it matched pretty well. Backing up, the creamy color is visible but considering what this PF used to look like... I think it turned out pretty good.

Here's a couple post inserts going back into the PF:

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Ok. Painting done. I completely went over all the blacks, put in new stars on top, redid the area above the apron where it says Firepower.. etc, ALL the white lettering (in the off-white cream color), a good portion of the planet, all of the blue airship (I used a metallic blue on the wings), the reds leading from the airship and to the targets, all the whites under plastics, the jetstream from the airship, and finally I did my best to touch up the areas around the pop-bumpers that I screwed up removing mylar.

From here I moved on to the inserts. I bought a lot of new inserts (the ones available), and reused the old in some places. For the new ones, I had to sand off the raised lettering they come with, then polish them up with successively less gritty paper. For the old ones, it involved a similar process to remove the cupping, then get them polished up as well. I found this worked well on a marble slab and block of wood.

Here's a new one example going through the stages of sandpaper:

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This looked something like 100 grit, 200, 400, 600, 1200, 2000. Then Novus 2. Then I washed them all off. Final result:

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Then back to the PF with all the inserts and my 3rd mistake. I only had liquid superglue. I thought "how bad could this go.. superglue is superglue I'll just be careful". Use the gel! Liquid superglue despite best efforts will get on your fingers, and potentially on the back of the inserts as you try to keep them flat while it dries. Once it's done.. the deed is done as they set pretty fast. It *does* set them in pretty good though.. just messy.

I used the block of wood on top to set them flush with the playfield. Process: Dab glue on insides of insert area on PF, insert goes in, wood on top, hammer insert flush.

I had used a dremel to sand out some of the old insert glue previously, which widened the insert holes enough in some areas that it was necc. to hold the insert in place from the bottom while it dried. Thus the superglue issue and fingerprints. Luckily most of them were pretty tight-fitting still.

An hour later inserts are all glued in flush:

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With that done, I needed to re-decal all the inserts. They all needed to be done since I had either sanded the cupped ones or installed entirely new ones. I bought the decals (ebay?) which easily peel off and stick. The key lines don't entirely match up on some (grrr). But I decided this was worth it over trying to repaint all this lettering and do straight keylines. So on they went.

I noticed there were no keylines for three inserts.. which ended up being the three red inserts by the upper target in the pop bumpers. I wasn't feeling up to painting these so I just left it alone. You can also note in the picture below where the light hits the planet where I had touched up a lot of the planet colors outside of the area that was bare wood. Once cleared, you can't see these touch-ups at all.

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Here I lit it up from behind to see how they looked:

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Also noticable are new blue star inserts (eventually with new white stars.. the old ones were not worth cleaning up).

I should have mentioned that prior to repainting anything I sanded down the playfield to get rid of any previous clear and help my new clear stick. Obviously this should be done prior to painting or your paint will just come right off. The correct technique probably would have been to spray clear first, then paint, then more clear in order to lock in the original paint and allow room for error so touch-ups could be removed and redone if necc. I'm not quite that fancy though.. using varathane basically meant that I would have had to spray clear, wait a month, then paint, then spray again. I didn't see the point in the long wait so I just went for it.

The play field at this point is ready for clear. I taped off all the holes with painters tape, and built a frame for the playfield to sit in since I hadn't removed any of the backside hardware (again part of me cutting corners, and trying to hurry this process up.. also I was too daunted by that task).

Here's the playfield inside the frame, cleaned off multiple times with varathane to ensure no oil residues are left and limit fish-eyes and maximize adhesion of the varathane.

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I'll point out here -- I did a lot of research on clears. There seemed to be 2 spray can options and then the full auto-clear option. I don't have a paint booth nor do I like working with hazardly chem's, nor do I have an air compressor, paint gun, full mask.. etc etc.. It seemed like many people had good results with Varathane (water-based) and I was able to find some locally, plus I liked that I could do it without buying all this equipment and didn't have to worry about all the harmful chemicals in autoclear.

Downside was that I wouldn't get quite as a good a clear job, and that I would be waiting a while for this to cure up.

All that being said, this is what a DIY paint booth in the basement looks like:

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I hung a wood frame from the ceiling with painters brown drop-cloth paper around it, sealed to the floor with blue painters tape. I sealed two air filters into the dropcloth and ran a fan on one side to push airflow through.

The right side of the drop cloth I would just lift up to access the pf after each coat dried, pull it out and sand it, then return it, spray, and reseal the drop cloth down. Of course because of the low clearance I was doing this on my hands and knees. Would I do this again... ehhhh I think probably not. I'd probably go autoclear next time but I've since moved on to move expensive pins that I wouldn't do many of these things to.

Anyway this is how it went for roughtly 6-8 coats of varathane. I let each dry about 24H, then sand it (lightly.. the varathane is still pretty soft at this point and could easily tear. Also the layers are pretty thin to avoid clouding so you can sand through them pretty easily) to smooth out some of the orange peel and off-level areas (partially from painting).

Here's a few of the process.

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You can see when I pulled it out after maybe the second coat, it's not looking to flat. But you just keep spraying and sanding and eventually it gets much better.

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Thanks! Glad to see someone found this post already Not sure how many will actually look at it but I thought it would be good just to document.

OK.. let's take a look at the final results. The clear looks cloudy, esp on the blacks and over time most of this actually clears up. After the final coat, I let the PF sit about a month to let the clear completely dry before final buffing.

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What you can't see here is my 4th mistake (well 4th documented mistake.. probably made a lot more so far). The decals on the inserts. They are kind of thick, and thus stuck up above the level of the PF after I spent all that time setting the inserts in flush. I figured I could correct this with the clear through progressive sanding but instead I found that I couldn't sand very much over these areas without just rubbing off all the clear quickly and leaving the bare decal exposed.

I did the best I could and after 7-8 coats of clear I was seeing more clouding than I felt comfortable with so I called it good. The clear did partially level off things but some of the decals to have a noticeable "bump" when run your hand over them. WAAAYYY better than the previously cupped ones though.

OK. So this sits for a month and I move on to some other tasks. Buffing. I started with a 1/2hp bench grinder I got for $3 at a garage sale. This quickly proved another PITA and I bought a 3/4hp from harbor freight (which I see some people will advise against, but personally I found it to work well..especially in comparison to what I was using previously).

I buffed guides, pop rings, shooter knob, probably a few other things with 3 different successive rouges with good results. I'll let the pictures do the talking here.

Pop bumpers:

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Shooter: (previously, and after most of the machine is back together & repainted cab)
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Other hardware:
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I could go on but you get the idea there. The rest of the hardware I tumbled (again, thank you harbor freight for the tumbler). Below are shots of all the metal stuff cleaned up as best I could. There were some larger pieces that just needed more effort than I was willing to put in.

I was worried about mixing up hardware so I carefully labeled everything from the bags I made when I pulled everything off the play field. I still ended up with some random screws.. oh well.

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Also, I'll mention in the above photo the ugly "wallpaper" wood rail guides that afix atop the playfield to all the sides. Much of these are visible and I hated that wallpaper. I scraped it all off and painted these all black, then cleared them. Picture to follow if I can find one.

No pictures of the final black painted wood rails unfortunately really except this comparison here:

Previous:
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New:
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Here's a few final hardware clean-ups:

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I also cleared the back of all the plastics lightly to protect them (after 'baking' a number of them in the oven to get them to lay flat again.. if you look back you will see how bad the kicker plastics were bent up from the heat from the lights there) and repainted all the pop body's black to match the theme.

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All the plastic posts were washed off and scrubbed, and I sprayed the backglass which def. was flaking. After tumbling the hardware I spent a while cleaning out all the walnut media from the screw holes (arrg) with a pin. But they all look nice.

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Jumping to the head. I took all the boards out and cleaned down all the aluminum backing and hardware. It was dirty.

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I pulled all the bulbs from the head light board and windexed the 'burn marks' off and cleaned out the sockets with a dremel for better bulb contact.

Mistake #5 - someone suggested spakle to repair small missing wood chunks.

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which I did, but in retrospect not having experience with this I would follow Vid's guide and go with.. was it an epoxy? bondo probably would have been fine here too. Anyway, sanded down the head a bit and began repainting. I went the cheap route ("$140 for stencils?! I can totally do this for way less") and used tracing paper, painters tape, razors, and a lot of time. Next time I'll buy the stencils It DID turn out pretty good considering though.. There was some overspray/paint leakage on some edges, and the painting wasn't all at the same grade so it's not smooth to the touch. But 100% better than when I started.

Pre paint:
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half done, only black left.
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sides done:
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Final result:

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And a blurry lightboard:
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On to the cab. I thought it would look better all painted, and converted to a new style of bracket to allow the PF to swivel up. So... I removed all the boards inside that hold up the PF, drilled holes, and mounted brackets on the PF. First time I mounted them too forward so the back of the PF hit the bottom of the cab when rotating. 2nd time was a charm. I filled in the first holes and they got painted over.

I did this one side at a time, the same as the head with tracing paper, lots of painters tape, a razor, and again lots of time. I sprayed all the sides first, then the inside. On the braces I did red, and on the left side board where tilt bob and other hardware sits I did a sort of custom racing stripe with yellow and red. Coat of semi-gloss clear over everything once done.

Pictures....

Cab stripped and wood pulled off ready to paint.
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one side before any paint.
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After:
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process:
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**disclaimer, I later learned not to sand lead-based paint inside the house. Luckily I only just lightly sanded it so I don't think I did any real damage to myself or the basement..**

Coin door:
Before:
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After:
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Sideboard/inside cab:
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You can see it's not perfect by any means, but it looks so much better with the paint all refreshed and cleaned up.
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Reinstall hardware:

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Back to the PF. I final buffed it with a 6" orbital, with 3 or 4 different buffing compounds. Still minor clouding visible in a couple small places but overall the cloudiness pretty much as gone from the PF just sitting and curing.

Pretty straight forward here.. I'd put hardware back in the baggies as much as I could figure out. Then just a matter of going through each baggy and slowing getting everything back in place. As I went I installed new black rubbers. I had also replaced all the old 1-6 target's with completely new ones, then decaled them.

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Old targets:
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Bye bye!
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New ones going on:
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One final shot showing the nice clear, where I'm experimenting with pop bumper cabs and skirts. Settled on black skirts, blue caps (I replaced red lane guides up top with blue as well) although I still have the original cap's..

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Once assembled and everything together, I messed around with LED lighting. At the time, I was looking for something unique. I know there's lots of opinions on pinside and RGP about LED's.. to LED or not, what's best where, rainbow barf.. etc etc.. and there's going to be people that do not like what I went with. I tested a number of different colors though, and I liked the Ice blue optix for much of the GI. Call it how you want.. they are there and that's it. I installed LED's in the backbox to match, and under the PF as well. However, once installed I experienced issues with controlled lamps behaving oddly. I finally ended up pulling most of the LED's out from under the PF because of this. The behavior is back to normal though so I called it good.

Pictures:

Machine:
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Backglass: (Becuase of the flaking this didn't turn out how I wanted.. and if I spent more time I'd either replace it if I could ever find a new one.. or pull some of the bulbs out. without the flaking I think this would work)
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More: (sorry quality is mehh on some of these.. taken with Ipod in the dark.. not the greatest combo)

Lower PF: I added 2 spotlights on the slights to light up this usually pretty dark area
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Under PF & new bracket to easily swivel PF up.
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Inside coin door. I pulled the outside apart and buffed it up and waxed it. The inside I didn't have the patience for. I figured no one would really be looking at it anyway... and hey, it's a nice original touch
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whole machine, daylight:
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Dark, playfield:
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I also added in the lighted saucers mod. Pulled out white opaque eject shields and replaced with red. Tied flashing red lamps underneath the shields to the green arrows so the eject saucers flash in sync with the green arrows for locks. Nice effect. Lighted red flipper buttons as well, and added light strip under apron that shines blue out onto flippers.

I think that about covers the project. Overall very happy with how it turned out. Learned A TON! And am now back on track to slowly start my own build which hopefully should show up in another thread in home brew in a few months. In the end this was a lot more time and work than I had expected, but I was very happy to finish it. I expect this discrepancy multiplied a number of times over for this next project but I'm excited to start tackling it.

So with all that said.. I will say that during the duration of this project I had bought another 5 pins and sold 2. I had planned on keeping FP for a long time to come but I just don't have room for it now.. and thus last week have hauled it out to the garage to sell. If you've got any interest shoot me a PM doesn't *need* to go anywhere soon, just want to get it to a good home. Great pin for a first timer that is ok with learning to work a little bit on them as it's *Still* a 1980 game and isn't perfect. **Edit --SOLD*

Thanks Pinterest! Yeah I call it a "touch-up" which was the original intention but I think it pretty much turned into a 75% repaint haha. The brush actually worked well.. the clear cleaned up much of the strokes. I would never do this amount of painting again with a brush though.

A few final pictures just taken with better quality:

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Cleared the apron and shooter cover. Should have printed new cards.. not sure where to get the nice laminated/colored ones..

Shooter lane error -- I could have sanded a bit more to really get it looking nice before clearing but meh.. beginner's mistake.

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Last ones.

Few remaining small issues -- displays can flake out a little once in a while due to a cable seating issue.. could be fixed by re-soldering but I'm moving on to new projects. Pop bumper lights have contact issue between bulbs and fixtures due to using the old ones. Intermittent lighting when they pop. And I've had it lock up a couple times.. fixed by pressing on the CPU Rom chip. Guessing a reflow issue or needs to be socketed for best pin contact on the ROM. Hasn't been a problem lately though but would help bullet-proof it. Inside of the legs are not pretty at all, but no one really sees them. I cleaned up the inside of the back ones best I could since those would be most visible out of the 4.

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Almost forgot,

For anyone that reads this doing anything similar.. PF touch-up, etc. Here's what I found to work really well for touch-ups:

Acrylic paint. I used mostly the $0.99 ones you find at craft stores, wal-mart etc.

True Red (reds)
Leaf Green (extra ball, lower right)
Black satin & intense black (1:3 mix w/a bit of thinner)
White satin (I used gloss but there's no point since you're clearing anyway)
Bright yellow (jet trail)
Torquise w/2dabs of leaf green (down by the flippers on the planet)
Ultra marine + little ebony black (lighter blue hue also down by flippers on planet)
ultra marine + more ebony black (darker blue hue, same area)
Burnt sienna (brown, same area)
Ivory gloss + yellow satin (Faded white-cream color)
Wood grain.. decided best to leave alone. but got close with yellow satin, raw sienna, then added tad pure orange.

Thanks guys -- appreciate the kind words! I hope it does run another 35 years.. might take a new rottendog board set at some point down the road but hopefully will keep chugging along a while till that day comes

I'll double check -- some from Bay Area amusements and a few from Marcos I believe. I have some extras if you want them. Let me look around for them can't remember which I have.

Ohhhhh wish I had tried this. Nothing worse than watching artwork come off. Also will add that the flour and alcohol method for glue removal works like a charm