i'm new.. but this sort of stuff crosses over into the arcade stuff too. Restored is used pretty losely lol. Not to beep my own horn, but i'm probably one of the best arcade restorers out there right now. I am looking forward to doing some pin restoration work soon. I'll start my own thread and show off a few things, don't want to derail the OP's original post!

I absolutely agree with jimjim66 on that. it's not like you can go buy silkscreened new everything these days. and personally, i'd rather pay for the mint reliable machine.

i have tried 3 times to upload a few pics of my work, and i get page cannot be displayed, you must add some content first, and IE locked up once. this is how my entire day went lol

figured out i had to resize these! This was an Atari Paperboy machine that had 6 corners knocked off, and 4 other panels that were rough. I took the game sides off one at a time and replaced them. The art is solvent jet printed and cleared. Control panel overlays are silkscreened.

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Funny you mention cars. I used to restore cars too. I had a 67 mustang coupe that was all but rotted to the ground, and a tree had fallen on it. I turned it into a Fastback that looked like the gone in 60 seconds eleanor car and sold it for 45K and there was only about 15% of the car that was left that was original ford!

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no, i've never owned an Xmen machine. i pretty much stick to the 79 - 83 era. Paperboy was an exception, took it in trade. Some games are very hard to restore due to lack of artwork/parts. I have a few games i've slowly collected parts for years, and still not quite there. I am anxious to restore my black widow to sell, but all i can find is a solvent jet printed Cpo, normally i don't mind that if done right, but it's predominantly black, and that just never looks right. I also need a marquee and they are rarely in good condition. Two on ebay last week, both in terrible shape. I currently have about 30 - 35 machines to restore and sell, and 5 i think i'll hang onto.

I have a babypac that i'm going to restore and heavily document, it should impress anyone. I'm going to reproduce the playfield, the plastics, rechrome everything, new cabinet, etc.