Starting this thread to try and document my Flash Gordon restoration. Since I’ve learned many things from others doing these restorations, maybe there’s something I can contribute back.

Please note this will take me several months, so posts will be taking some time....

I would consider this a “medium plus” restoration, not a really high end, but certainly a lot more than simply cleaning up and making things work.

My list includes:

* Cabinet repair and paint using stencils
* Playfield - it’s trashed....
* Repair all boards from various issues and make more reliable
* New connectors and pins everywhere
* Clean & polish all metal parts @ playfield components
* Rebuild all playfield mechanics - flippers & drop targets
* Clean or replace plastics and other playfield parts
* Light sockets cleaned, plan to go with all LEDs

A couple pics from when I got this:

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#flash-gordon

Check this out. I’ve been sanding and prepping the cabinet. I hope Bally got a good deal on the plywood they used. It was never smooth! This is NOT supposed to be tiger maple!

Safety note: I’m in a temp spray booth set up and wearing respirator and vac with hepa filter... This keeps the probable lead dust for going everywhere. I’m only going far enough to make it flat-ish and remove loose flakes. I had to sand a little more than normally necessary to flatten the chatter marks from the plywood.

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I used black stain on the bottom. My excuse for doing it at all is maybe it locks out the old smells? I like this water based stain - quick work to make the bottom look better.

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Fiberglass resin to fix damaged edges, and pocket holes on some new bracing on the inside to hold the floor up. The plywood had split underneath and the bottom board was barely being held up. Screws put in from underneath to hold it up. This is fast & easy, and it strengthens the cabinet some.

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Primer, sanding, filling, sanding, priming again, sanding, sanding sealer, sanding....ugh. This won’t be gloss smooth, but it needs to be fairly smooth so they the stencils work best.

I used regular primer/sealer spray can, and completely emptied 3 cans of it. Bondo for the big holes, hard drywall patch for the smoothing filler. Regular sanding sealer really helps make the paint go on better.

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I'll go a little out of order here, since it seems I didn't take as many pictures as I thought, and I need to use pics from various steps to show this correctly.
First, the paint I chose is rattle-can variety - Regal Red, Gloss Black, and Metallic Champaign Bronze. Semi-Gloss Water Based poly for the topcoat, which I recommend highly as it's quite easy to apply with a spray-gun or wipe-on pads. The "2X" Gloss Black was a poor choice, as it turns out, but that will be discussed when I talk about the stencils. Overall, I ended up needing 4 cans of red, 3 cans of black, and 2 cans of the bronze.
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Since the bottom was black, and the top portion of the inside cabinet was red, I spent a little extra effort and made a bronze strip in the middle. Blue painter's tape did the trick. I simply masked off the bottom (black part), painted red all the way down "close" to the black, let it dry, and then masked off the top side of the bronze strip over the red. This really helped me in a couple ways: 1) The Bronze paint did very well covering up red & black. I didn't need primer. It covered quite well. 2) While removing the blue tape after the bronze was completely dry, it made a very nice crisp line. More on this on my stencil post...
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I installed new leg brackets and had to flatten the spot to get them to fit flush using a chisel. I should have done this before paint - lesson learned. I also had to use shims on the inside edge of the leg brackets to allow them to site flush against the sides. I didn't take picture of this, but I ended up gluing on some strips of a bicycle tire inner-tube for the shims, which held well and maybe better than cardboard strips. Pretty sure either would work, but the rubber was black.
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Final view of the inside of bottom cabinet. Pretty, clean, and solid.

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Back up a few steps. Red. Red. And more red!

After multiple coats of primer/sealer, sanded, more primer, a wall patch/filler/spackling (that is the WRONG product), I drained two cans of Regal Red. First a light coat, then came back around to a heavier coat. Not too great of pictures, but I think you get the idea.
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Biggest issue was the wood grain / pitting on the sides of the backbox. I should have used a good filler like a Bondo or Rage. I tried to use some wall spackling and then primer, but I guess it didn't get deep enough and sanded back out. Not wanting to do any more red, I decided this was going to be "Good Enough". I'm not going for an extremely flat, high gloss, car-show quality cabinet anyway.
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After 24-48 hours or drying time, you can see the red paint flowed out fairly nicely, and it dried firm to the touch. Spraying with rattle cans was easy enough, however the overspray was horrible. I was in my homemade spray booth, with a box fan and furnace filter creating negative airflow. The furnace filter ended up completely clogged with red. I wore a full respirator, so I had no idea of the smell. No problem. My lungs and eyes are safe. But everything inside the booth was red. My shirt was pink, and because I didn't want to ruin my shoes, I went barefoot. Nope. Bad idea. I still have red between my toes...

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Cabinet stencils. My first time using Pinball Pimp stencils, and absolutely I would use them again. I had received them as a Christmas gift, so they had aged a bit while in the shipping tube, but still they were sticky and no issues. It's not recommended to wait as long as I did to open & use them, but I just couldn't get to this project. Anyway, thumbs up.

Lots of folks have done threads on using these stencils for painting the cabinets, so I'll focus on the things that were a little different for me. Rather than using cardboard or Styrofoam as suggested, I had some scrap wood a quickly made up a wooden block to close up the coin door opening. This helps to make the surface flat so the stencil goes on easier. Pocket holes were used to secure the panel in the coin door opening. I've saved this for re-use on future projects.
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It had been two days since I finished spraying red. I was fired up, and it's time for stencils!

Black is the first color that goes on. I applied all (5) stencils for black, and sprayed them all.

Oh crap!

Lessons learned:
1) A light coat, wait 3-8 minutes depending, then another light coat. If the paint gets too thick, it's bad.
2) Only do 1 or 2 panels at a time. The idea is to peel away the stencil while the paint is still a little tacky - so the line is a clean break. You have a finite window of time where the dryness is just right. With all the details of these backbox stencils, if you run into trouble, which I did, it may take longer to peel off the stencil than you think. And at that point, the others were too dry.
3) Use the correct paint or at least test the paint for stenciling qualities first. I totally suspect that because of the primer additive of the "2X" paint, it dries faster and also seemed hold together and tear/peel instead of break cleanly when removing the stencil. I think I saw somewhere that I should have used the normal can - similar to the can of Regal Red that is shown above - instead of the "2X" version in black.

... Or maybe it was the gloss? ... Or maybe I should have let it dry completely??

Here are pictures of before then after the black stencils were used. I don't have enough pictures. There was a lot going on at the time... Notice the peeling along the edges of the black.

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Moving on to the next color, bronze metallic, this had to go better. I had learned that dried or almost dried bronze removed cleanly from the inside of the cabinet, so I figured light coats and letting it dry a bit more would not hurt for this color. Also, to avoid any further peeling of the black while removing the bronze stencil, I decided to run a layer of clear coat before applying the stencil. This helped too, similar to playfield paint repair, you have to use clear to seal in the layers underneath. So I wiped on a coat of the High Performance semi-gloss, let it dry, and then stuck down the next set of stencils. I did not worry about touching up the black areas that had peeled. I would do that at the end.
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Night & day difference! Check out how crisp the edges are for the bronze color. And peeling the stencil off was so easy!
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Of course, my original flaw from using the spackling showed up. A couple areas of the underlying red peeled up. As careful / slow / methodical peeling off the stencil, it took some red off. IMG_1257 (resized).JPEG

OK I needed some touch up anyways. A small brush, some black & red. Then apply about 3 or 4 quick coats of the semi-gloss poly. Wipe it on as smoothly as possible. And here are the final results:IMG_1258 (resized).JPEGIMG_1289(1) (resized).JPEGIMG_1290(1) (resized).JPEG

Almost forgot to mention - I cleaned up the legs and sprayed them with more Champaign Bronze. Here's a taste of what that looks like!

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The inside of the backbox was rough, to say the least. I cleaned and polished the aluminum panels and put them back. 22 gauge, 3/8" crown staples match the originals. I had to set the pressure pretty low (75 PSI) to avoid going right through the thin aluminum panels.

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The instruction & backbox cards were just too old and faded for my taste. I printed up some new ones a while back. These are printed on 65lb cardstock. I think the 65lb cardstock is the perfect thickness as the originals.

The color is NOT white - it's a "whip cream" color. It looks bright white against the old cards, but it's really not. I'm happy with how they turned out - and maybe I can actually read them now...
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Backbox now complete with board brackets cleaned & re-mounted.

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