Get ready to blast off on a restoration adventure! This isn't your momma's "new rubbers and some wax" restoration thread... we're talking major surgery here. Blood and guts everywhere. We're going to bring a trashed pinball machine back to life!

Before we dive into it, here's the background story. I picked up this Space Station from a really cool pinsider last summer. I really like restoring machines that most sane people would just part out, and these kinds of projects have been really hard for me to find. This machine was perfect. It could barely stand on its own. It had a dead mouse in it. The mechanics look mostly intact. The boards were there. The seller wasn't an axe murderer. Sold.

So let's see what we're dealing with here!

First a shot of the game from the side. Not so bad. Couple of scratches. Some rust. No problem...

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Well, let me show you another angle...

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Right. So we might have a wee bit of damage to repair there in that corner, I guess. And what is that peaking through the hole in the bottom? Oh, we'll get to that.

But the backbox must be in better shape, right? Let's have a look...

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Another minor scratch there. Right next to the giant f**king dent and fatal water damage.

Next step? Demolition. Time to tear this thing apart!

I'll be reusing what I can and fabricating whatever needs to be replaced. And I'll be using only a circular saw and a router for all of it. I'll do my best to take lots of pictures as I go so you can see how basic it really is.

Time to start breaking this thing down so we can assess what we are really dealing with. We want to evaluate which parts can be saved and which parts are too far gone to re-use.

Here's one more look from the front before we get into it. Nice lockdown bar, at least.

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First things first, let's rummage around in the coin box!

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Let's see... score cards... extra light bulbs... acorn shells... mouse poop. Looks like everything's here!

There were lots of signs of mice living in the machine. They crapped all over the mini playfield and hauled a lot of house insulation into it for bedding. Luckily, they did not seem interested in chewing the wiring. I'm sure we will run into some damage later from mice chewing on something though.

Next, let's have a look at that nasty corner. See if you can spot the non-standard part in this picture...

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Did Williams use 4x4 posts? It's actually an interesting fix. Someone braced the corner with this and screwed it to the cabinet with 3" long lag screws. The leg was then screwed into the post with more lag screws.

I don't have a picture of the leg, but it was mangled pretty badly. I have no idea what happened to this machine, but it really took a hit at some point.

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There is also water damage under the transformer on the cross brace. I can't figure out why this would be water damaged on its own like this, since it is raised up. Maybe it was in the rain and water ran down the wires at some point?

Time to clear out all the hardware from inside the cabinet, and then we'll decide what repairs are needed.

For budget, I know I need to buy a new main ramp, cabinet stencils, paint, clear, and around $60 of lumber. I think there's a display out too. Hopefully $500 or so total if I'm lucky.

Time frame? Not sure. The big road block right now is I need to get a new air compressor before I can do proper paint and clear coat. Hopefully within the next couple of months I'll have all that worked out. I'm building a spray booth and supplied air system in the garage to do all this in.

Yeah, RTR is an awesome seller and made it crystal clear to me the condition of this machine before I bought it. That said, if he had five more of these for sale I would buy all five instantly.

It's really hard to find projects like this in my area because hurricane Katrina wiped out so much. There were not many pins in the south to begin with!

Finished cleaning out the cabinet. Removed the transformer, coin door, all buttons, wiring, and so on. I even vacuumed the poop!

Now we can figure out which parts of this cabinet are structurally sound. Any wood that is water damaged and rotting will have to be replaced. You'll know what wood is good just by feeling it and poking at it with a screwdriver. If it's soft and flaky, it's probably toast. If just the top layer of the plywood is separating from the inner layers (called de-lamination) it might be repairable with some wood glue and clamps.

In the picture below I marked the water-damaged area in red. The bottom panel of the cabinet is just a thin piece of MDF and is very susceptible to water damage, so it will need to be replaced. Even if the bottom were good, it's usually better to replace it with a stronger piece of plywood anyway.

The front panel where the coin door goes is a goner. The bottom is eroded away, and since a leg is supported by this corner we want it to be stable. We'll make a new one.

The right side panel has some serious damage, but it really only affects less than 10% of the panel. We could try to save this by cutting out the damaged wood, cutting a new piece to replace it, and joining the two pieces back into one panel. I'm not going to bother, because it's easier to just cut an entire new panel. We have to repaint the whole thing anyway.

The other damaged piece in this picture is the vertical cross brace. It looks ok in the picture, but water seeped into the joint and rotted the tongue. We'll just make a new one of these too.

The horizontal brace that the transformer sits on is actually completely solid, even though it looks bad. The water stains are just superficial and can be sanded out and painted over.

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Here's a picture of the other end of the cabinet. Good news here. The left side panel, the back panel, and the neck are all good wood. The left panel has some minor de-lamination and bubbling at the bottom edge from water exposure, but we'll just repair it. Why not just replace it? Well, it's about $20 worth of lumber and I really like the idea of keeping some of the original cabinet!

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Here's a picture of the underside of the neck. You can see here that it is very clean and solid, so we can be sure it will hold the backbox up just fine.

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We'll get to the backbox later. Next, we'll take off the side rails and then start cutting some wood!

Let's take off these side rails. We want to get them off intact so we can use them again. You've probably seen a lot of threads where people destroy their rails trying to get them off. Here's an easy way to do it.

Get yourself a paint scraper and a heat gun. A heat gun is just a hair drier for men. Under the rail, there is a strip of gummy adhesive that holds the rail to the cabinet. We want to melt the adhesive. Point the heat gun right at the side of the rail and heat it up. Poke your paint scraper under the rail until you feel the adhesive get soft. Once it's soft, push the scraper towards the top of the rail through the adhesive. Do the same thing all the way along the rail and it will eventually pop right off.

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Once the rail is off, you can remove the plastic T-channel that holds the playfield glass. This is often brittle, so be very gentle with it. It should be held on with just a few small staples. Work those out with a screwdriver made for babies, but be very careful because the plastic can crack easily!

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Voila! Rail is removed! Now you can scrape off excess adhesive, and finish cleaning up with Goo Gone. You want to get all of the old stuff off of there so you can sand this down later.

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Next, we'll start smashing the cabinet to pieces and start building our new panels!

That's about $200 more than I'm spending! Really I just enjoy doing this stuff, so rather build it myself.

I've done lots of cabinet and furniture work. Pinball machine cabinets are very simple. Anyone can build one if they learn a couple of basic joints and cuts.

Here are pictures of my Haunted House cabinet I cleaned up last summer. I think the hardest part was taking apart that System 80 coin door!

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Time to start actually building stuff. We'll just start at the bottom.

The bottom panel that William's used in the cabinet was just a flimsy piece of 1/4" MDF. That stuff will disintegrate if you fart at it, so I'll just replace it with a piece of 1/4" plywood that I already had in the garage. Much stronger.

This will be easy. We just have to cut a rectangle and put a few holes in it. I'll cut the plywood down to size on my fancy expensive table saw... oh wait, I don't have a table saw! We'll use this cheap circular saw and a homemade jig instead.

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This setup is all I need to do every single saw cut for this entire project. The dark brown wood is a piece of scrap I cut off an old desk top. Then I screwed a nice straight piece of pine to it for the saw edge to ride against. Take your circular saw and cut the base piece using the straight edge. Now you can use this over and over to cut perfect straight lines every time!

One important tip. Circular saws usually come with a blade called a "rip blade". It has fewer teeth and is made for doing quick rough cuts. It's good on a construction site when you just want to rip fast and move on. If you want to do nice clean cuts with a circular saw, get yourself a "finishing blade". It has more teeth and cuts a smoother line with less chipping.

Ok, let's see how are bottom panel fits into our cabinet!

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As you can see, I've removed the damaged side and front panels that we are going to replace. I forgot to take pictures while I was doing that. The important thing is to go slow and protect the pieces you want to keep. Trim the damaged pieces away from the good pieces and clean up joints with a sharp chisel. I'll build the joints back up with a little bit of epoxy or wood filler and then sand them back to be perfectly flat so that we have nice tight joints when we glue it all up later.

All that's left is to put the holes back into the bottom panel. Use a hole saw, spade bit, forstner bit or whatever you've got for the smaller holes. I used my router to cut the large speaker hole in the center. No pictures of that, but I'll show some better examples of routing holes later in this thread.

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We'll do the front panel with the coin door and the new side panel next!

Next we'll make a new front panel. This is a little more difficult than doing the bottom. We have to cut some odd shaped holes for the shooter assembly, the coin door, and the start button.

You also want to be as precise as possible with the dimensions of the front panel because it effects the width of the cabinet. It would not be fun to put your cabinet back together and realize the playfield doesn't quite fit. We'll do some additional tricks later when we assemble the cabinet to make sure this sort of thing doesn't happen.

So first, we just need to cut a piece of 3/4" plywood to the correct size. I traced some things onto this just for show... I won't actually use any of that to make any of the cuts. Also, check out the damage on that old panel.

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Now we just need to reproduce the holes for the coin door, shooter, and start button. We'll use the original panel as a template for the new one. Literally! It's important to line this up precisely. I use spring clamps to hold everything while I line it up roughly.

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Next, I'll clamp it down to my bench really tightly with bar clamps. When you use bar clamps, it's a good idea to use a piece of scrap or padding under the clamp to keep the cleat from digging into your finished piece!

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Time to cut the hole for the coin door. I'll use my router to do this. If you're some kind of master woodworker you can probably freehand this. I'm not, so I'll use a "template bit". This bit has the usual sharp parts for cutting, but it also has a little bearing that rides against the edge of a template. This limits the path that you can cut so that it can only produce the shape of your template. In our case, the template will be the old front panel.

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Adjust the router bit depth and trace around the shape of the old coin door hole that's clamped under your work piece. But be careful! If I were to complete the cut pictured below with just the router, the center piece of scrap would fall and the router will most likely grab it and kick it violently, possibly damaging the work piece or your body!

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Safety first. I'll cut the large piece free with a jig saw. Now it is safe to remove the remaining wood with the router and clean up!

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The shooter hole is exactly the same procedure. Line it up, drill a starting hole, and route it out. Let's see how our front panel came out!

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Not bad. Next we'll add the hole for the start button!

Thanks for all the kind words, much appreciated!

Now we need to make the hole in the coin door for the start button. This one is a little tricky because it's not just a simple straight-thru hole. Here's what the start button hole looks like...

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There's really two holes here. The smaller diameter hole goes all the way through the back of the wood. The larger hole only goes about half way through the wood.

This is easy to get right as long as you do things in a certain order. Since we need to drill with two different bits, we need a point to keep our bits centered for both cuts. We'll use a small pilot hole for this. Locate and mark the center point of where you want your button hole to go and drill a small pilot hole straight through the wood.

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Now we can drill our two holes... but which should we drill first? If we drill the smaller hole first it will consume the pilot hole, so drill the larger hole first! I'll use a 7/8" spade bit for this (shown above). Use the pilot hole to keep it centered, drill it slowly, and watch the depth.

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Be careful that the tip of the spade bit does not chew out too much of your pilot hole on the opposite side of the wood. If it looks like this might happen drill half the depth first, then do the smaller hole and finish the larger one after. My bit tip is shallow enough that I didn't have to worry about that.

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Now we need to drill the smaller hole. Flip your panel over and your pilot hole should still be there. Simple drill straight through the pilot hole and you're done!

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Here's a side-by-side shot of the old and new front panels. The new one is on the right, in case you can't tell.

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Next we'll get the large right panel done, dry fit all the cabinet pieces, and see how it looks!

So now we need to build a new side panel because the other one died. I'll cut the whole panel to size with the circular saw again, as before...

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Then I'll rabet the edge with my router...

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Easy!

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All that's left to finish the cabinet is to make a new cross brace. Here's what the cross brace looks like. Actually, that's not really what it should look like. See why? I somehow didn't notice the grain going in the wrong direction! It doesn't really matter, but it's a really bad mistake and I'll just make another one.

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Now I need to cut a dado into the panel for the brace to mate to...

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This needs to be accurate so that the brace is at a nice ninety degree angle. To quickly line up cuts like this, I use a custom-made spacer as shown below. I make one of these spacers for every router bit I own. Just place the edge of the spacers exactly where you want the router to cut, and put your fence against the opposite edge! Square it up and you get a perfect cut.

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Clamp it down and cut!

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Nice and tight. Perfect ninety degrees!

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Next I'll cut a groove for the transformer shelf to fit into. This is the same process as for the cross brace above.

Mark where the groove should go...

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Set up a cutting guide using the spacer that matches my router bit...

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Route it out...

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Done!

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Next, I'll put all the cabinet parts together to make sure everything fits!