Our Robocop finally arrived safe and sound, and now begins the restoration process! While the renovation won't cover every square inch, the general plans are to restore the cabinet, service all electronics and connections, and clean/fix the playfield as best as possible. We're probably going to leave the old mylar for now and touch-up any bad areas to leave the general patina of the pf (most of the artwork is still intact). An overview below:

The Bad
1. Rough cabinet with lots of flaking and chips
2. Various pieces missing or damaged on playfield
3. Lots of broken or warped plastics
4. Backglass missing red and blue inserts
5. Playfield harness hack job (someone cut harness at some point and soldered back together)
5. Mylar'd playfield with planking areas, paint chipping, and general wear.

The Good
1. Game turns on and plays
2. Sound seems to be working just fine (and it's glorious)
3. It's Robocop

General Plan for renovation
1. Tear down machine piece by piece, document findings, take lots of photos, and build it back to semi-restored state (best we can with available repro parts and whatever we manage to produce ourselves)
2. Tear down top side of playfield and clean it well, will likely do some touch up paint. Thinking of just keeping mylar to avoid certain doom with paint lifting
3. Sand down entire cab, repair/reinforce as needed, fill, sand, fill, sand, sand, sand, sand, and get all the edges back and surfaces flat. Primer and some paint
4. Apply new decal set (from RR). This will be my first decal process
5. Restore speaker panel (needs some glue/filling for cracked areas and new paint)
6. Rebuild playfield with flipper rebuilt, new rubbers, replacement posts, drop targets, pop bumpers, lane guides, and new plastics (managed to snag last set from Pinball Rescue before Lee shut down...whew)
7. Install new side rails (Data East repros). Bought these from pinball center and had them post-forwarded through Germany. Fun!
8. Install new coin door
9. Install new legs with metal leg protectors (went with blk ribbed Williams replacements)
10. Fix power connector and add molex connectors to playfield harness in order to improve servicing and undo the solder job
11. Inspect bottom playfield, boards, etc, reflow solder, check general voltages etc.
12. Find replacement glass or just add trim rails to existing BG (it's not too bad all things considered
13. Design/implement solution for backglass inserts (either cut some colored lexan or use a gel)
14. BONUS: Try to fix warped right ramp and look at designing replacement decals for it
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Overview of playfield and worse for wear areas

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First job was to cut the harness at the backbox where a previous owner once cut and re-soldered the wires back together. Labeled all the wires and cut them once more. Plan is to crimp these into a molex-style connector.

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Playfield pulled and disassembled to a point where it could go on the rotisserie. Began documenting the tear down with photos and removing parts from the top of PF.

Findings:
1. Stationary target assemblies are pretty borked. Three target assembly needs a replacement target, and the steel backstops are bent to hell
2. P.O.L.I.C.E insert lamps below the jump ramp melted the inserts at some point and charred that entire area
3. This heat damage also warped and discolored the jump ramp
4. Most of the plastics are bent, cracked, or discolored.
5. Lots of missing posts and rubbers on the PF
6. Besides some general wear and the burn issue, PF is in decent shape. Cleaned it up and now looking into the touch-up areas

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First project I wanted to tackle was the stationary target banks. Not sure if the bracket stops behind the targets are made anymore, so I decided to make new ones in lieu of bending the old ones back to shape. The stock I found was a thicker gauge angle steel lying around.

Considerations
1. New angle is thicker therefore stiffer and less likely to bend due to impacts over time
2. Since it's thicker, need to ensure the assembly fits through the pf slot cleanly and doesn't affect the target gaps.

Process:
1. To match old part geometry, a 0.15" strip was cut from the angle.
2. Remaining strip was cut into 2.65" lengths (total of 7 for the two target banks)
3. Each piece was belt sanded to correct length (2.625")
4. Rough angle cut was finger sanded down to level and smooth to maintain similar thickness to old parts
5. Copied hole dimensions and transferred with a punch. Used drill press to cut the holes
6. Parts were sand blasted and painted with SEM trim black.

Additionally, the bottom-side target bank brackets and topside coil bracketry (for the kickouts) were sandblasted and painted black as well. Last photo shows first test fit with the four bank targets.

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Inlane guides were in pretty rough shape; they got an orbital sand, but the edges were aggressively mushroomed in some places. Not clear if these are available to buy, but figured it would be useful to model the geometry for those who might want it. Plan is to laser or waterjet a couple sets of these for fun, maybe play around and do something interesting with them. TBD.

Inlane Guides
1. Traced the guides to get a rough outline and hole placement of both parts
2. Scanned the traces with a printer, converted PDF to PNG and imported into SolidWorks
3. No re-sizing necessary which was nice, but rotated the image so the traces were orthogonal to the reference plane
4. Used calipers to measure actual geometry and corroborate CAD data with the outlines. Used this method to "fit" the new CAD geometry to the trace.
5. Printed 2D part drawings and test fit with original parts. Success!

Plan is to install the old parts when the pf gets put back together, but they'll be easy to swap out when I get around to making a set. Can send folks the CAD if they want it for their own Robocops, but haven't tested the fit that far myself yet.

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Haha, having just watched it again last week, you're right on.

Right ramp is warped pretty bad. Gave it a little heat treatment, but process is slow going. Also realize there's two cracks at the entrance than I'll need to repair once I get it to a reasonable state. In order to get there, I needed to peel off the tired decals as they started to bubble underneath. Means there's no turning back from replacements!

Peeled the ramp decals and scanned them in. Spent the afternoon moving them into gimp where I started the process of cleaning them up. Once they're roughed out, I'll move these into Adobe and vectorize them. Will be a learning experience, but hoping a full set of fresh ramp decals shall emerge!

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Here are the scans if anyone else wants to have a set. Scanned at 600dpi; they're pretty beat-up and dirty, but it's something to go on at least.

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Thanks! Really appreciate that. Starting to doubt there's enough of these left to warrant any ramp makers to do it, but I'm going to make a CAD model anyway and see where that gets me.

First pass on the inside ramp decal complete. Haven't color matched yet, but it's a start. My scans were just fair, so intent was to design these in the spirit of the old ones, but there are some key differences. I suck with PS and vector work, so my go-to is to build the art in CAD. It's probably the dumbest way to go, but it's easiest for me to re-create with splines and relations. The scans were also not completely straight, so had to do a lot of lining-up and averaging to get it right while still maintaining the overall proportions.

Artwork Comparison
1. Lines are overall neater, looks less like hand work compared to the old outlines (which is a bummer)
2. Number of rivets and rough size/locations the same, but these are lined-up a little more and uniform in size
3. Added some missing/omitted illustration from the end (right side)
4. Sticker serial numbering is the same, but I changed the font (using the Robocop font type) in lieu of recreating the hand-drawn feel.
5. Colors are off obviously.

Next Steps
1. Finish rough passes on other decals
2. Tweak rivet sizing
3. Print some test pieces and fit to ramp
4. Make any changes, play with color/resolution, and get a set made.

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Making progress on the decals. Have inner and outer ramp decals fully modelled and ready for test prints. Ultimately, these will get printed from the SVG files (or similar), but process so far is to export as a PDF from SolidWorks and run these through Vector Magic before importing into Adobe/GIMP and doing color work. Images below are just a fuzzy png from GIMP, but the vectors turned out really nice, and almost replicate more of the freehand look of the originals.

Of course, the ramp surface decal will be the most fun to do, so queuing that up after the long strip on the jump edge. Should have some test print fittings later today on my totally not borked and twisted right ramp.

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Right ramp decals are almost good to go. Scaling changed somewhere in the process, but these are vectors now so it should be pretty easy to fix. Printing test pieces and attaching to ramp tomorrow!

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Decals are 99% there! Printed some test pieces today and tweaked a few angles to get the fit right. I made some assumptions that these decals were originally designed with a virtual bottom plane, but the rear section on the front side wall actually dips down relative to the front section. My scans showed this, but I didn't trust them so ended up learning the hard way. Another hour of changes and I'm pretty happy with the result.

All told, these took a week to get to this point from the scans. Process went something like this.

1. Scanned each section and loaded into GIMP. All told, there are 8 separate decals that comprise the right ramp.
2. "Knit" each section together to create a total of 4 models and saved as a PNG
3. Imported these PNGs into SolidWorks and modeled each section using splines and relations. Black outlines formed a single body, grey fills are their own body, and so on and so forth for the additional colors on the main ramp.
4. Separated the models back into their respective sections and moved them into a DWG.
5. Saved each section as a PDF and brought them into Vector Magic where they were converted to SVGs and the white background was removed
6. Brought all files into GIMP once more and adjusted colors
7. Used "Median Blur" filter on the outlines the thicken them to match the scans a little more
8. Test print and install on the ramp

Through this entire roundabout process, I managed to maintain the scaling all the way through up to the first prints. Realized those were getting auto-scaled by the printer, so used MS office today to insert the final PNG and scale it back to standard paper size. They now match the real decals 1 which is a huge relief. Of course, the repro isn't a perfect match. There are some differences in outline thicknesses here and there (especially on the entry sign), but I want to see how a decal print shows first and guessing it may not be super noticeable when installed on a working machine.

Next Steps
1. Probably going to fill the rivets back in with grey. Thought these might be fun with transparency, but the original decals are opaque in these areas
2. Find a suitable vendor and see if they can match the colors (will ask for some samples)
3. Print a set in clear vinyl or similar. Not actually sure what these were printed on originally.
4. Finish cleaning up and re-heating my sad busted right ramp.
5. Install new decals and move on to greener pastures.

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Taking a break from PF and moving on to bigger issues. Decals finally arrived from RR, so I'm inclined to turn to the cabinet work. It's going to need a lot of love; lot's of patching, filling, and sanding ahead, but there's not a whole lot in the way.

Disconnected the rest of the harness, pulled the backbox off the hinges, and moved all to the table where the board cluster was removed. Just a few parts left to remove before sanding commences.

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An exciting development! New plastics just arrived!

Managed to snag these before Pinball Rescue closed-down. Having replaced some parts on Gorgar last year and seeing these now, it's a huge bummer to lose PBR; their work is top notch.

I saw a want-ad for some decals recently, so I'll scan what I can to keep the doors of future reproductions open. More importantly, these plastics are slated for the danger zone (Data East flippers pack a bang), so I'm going to model some plastic protectors for these and I'll share the CAD/DXF files when completed.

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Teardown continued today. Removed all the harnesses and bagged the PCBs. Bought a kit to fix the problem connector on the power board last week and turns out that header was fried already so it'll be a welcome replacement.

We removed the rest of the lower cab components and wiring as well. The last pieces to remove are the ground straps, a few mesh screens, and some misc. cards stapled to the wood. The interior was a complete mess; the floor had a wide variety of broken fuses, screws, and random switch parts scattered about. A quick vacuum cleaned it all up in short order.

Did a re-org of all the parts and separated them all into bins. Along with tons of photos, most of the small parts and hardware are bagged and labeled to make re-assembly a breeze.

Next steps are to do final stripping (side rails, ground straps, etc) and starting the TLC process on the cab and back box. Going to wood glue a few de-laminating zones first, inspect all the joints, and do a first pass at sanding. Once that's complete, we'll start patching all the large damaged areas with resin and fiber fill.

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More progress today

1. Removed rest of HW from cabinets and backbox. Side rails, glass trim, and ground straps were removed; we don't own stock in Vampliers, but highly recommend a set to remove flush fastener heads. Side rail nails and cab staples came out without a hitch. These rails had no tape or glue, only nails holding them on, so curious if these left the factory this way or someone replaced these down the line.
2. With cab and backbox down to bare-ish, tackled a couple de-laminating areas with some wood glue and fill pieces where needed. Going to make sure most of what's present is intact before initial sanding, but all of the major edge damage will be fixed with the fiberglass resin method.
3. Backbox plate was DA'd and further cleaned with steel wool. It's far from finished, but in a much better place now.
4. Began some initial wiring work. Tackled all the old solder junctions save for the main PF harness. Using Molex mini-fits rated for higher currents (even though standard pins would be more than safe enough). Only have up to 24-pin connectors on hand, so the main PF harness will require three connectors to live again which is fine (yay color-coding!).

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At the start of this project, one of the bigger tasks was fixing the harness hack solder job. Though not limited to just the PF trunk, that junction represents the largest time and effort in the harness. One half is now complete! Tonight, all 72 wires were trimmed back, stripped, and crimped with mini-fits. With two of us working, it took a little over an hour to complete. The other half (playfield side) is next, and then it's time to shove them all into a connector and find the nearest beer.

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The worst of the harness is behind us. All 146 wire ends from the playfield were stripped, crimped, and loaded into connectors. Connectors will get some color-codes since the three main molex conns are identical, but I tried to group by colors to make it easier. Gauges vary in the harness, but these pins are overkill for pretty much anything in the power system. Going to clean up the harnesses themselves and check other connection points before switching to the PCBs.

Also playing with some custom apron cards, but still WIP.

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At a minimum, I will scan the new plastics and send those to anyone who wants them. I don't know who to contact, but I'd send the new ones out to anyone that currently reproduces plastics and could use them as a reference for a new set. I doubt the PBR guys would mind since most of us are in this for preservation and not $$. I can definitely send you my old ones as well, but they're pretty beat up and sad.

For the ramp, it's probably never going to be smooth again, but I'm going to keep sneaking up on it. Think I need to attach mini-jigs as I go to keep surfaces straight and promote the heated plastic to flatten more. Would be a good opportunity to learn vacuum forming, but that's a huge rabbit hole. I can send you a set of decals when they're complete. Like I mentioned earlier, I wasn't going for a complete 1 to the originals, but they should be close enough to pass if you don't compare side-by-side. I still need to link the real PDF scans here as well.

Happy to help in anyway I can. Gotta save all the Robocops! It looks like Retro Refurbs also has a min set for the high risk plastics, but they've been out of stock for awhile. Guessing they're waiting to make more until enough people join the waitlist?

Does your backglass have the red and blue inserts behind it? Mine does not, and I'm looking for some reference photos to determine how best to remake them.

You rock, thanks. I owe some scans here, so I'll start loading those tomorrow when I'm back in the office.

Looks fantastic! I'm probably going to go that route. I'm getting an injection molding quote, but expect it to be astronomical.

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statictrance and co, here are the scans I could make with my limited office scanner.

Overview/Settings:
- 8.5" x 12" Scan Area (paper scans are on normal 8.5x11 hence the border on some of these)
- 600 DPI
- Essentially everything PBR sold except the two large plastics (will figure out a solution with those)
- Ramp Decal Scans
- Inlane CAD Scans

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Holy mushroom, those are beat! I can't wait to see yours all fixed up.

Time to begin cab stripping. Still conflicted on the main cabinet versus the head. The original artwork is still intact to some degree, and sanding it away is a sad proposition. Head is in much more dire condition; art is almost completely destroyed with all the major flaking, and the wood is beat up every surface. Started here and knocked most of the paint off. Going to glue the rest of the delaminating edges, then start the fiberglass resin process for all the holes and huge chips.

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You're not crazy, it's a tough call. When I started out, I was excited to do a decal job for the first time, good opportunity to learn and see for myself what's it's like. It's painful to sand-off art, and I think making that call is where the real challenge is. I have a Gorgar with an original pf that has wear in some spots, but overall looks great which is why I'd never sand it down for a hardtop (nothing against those, but I think there's a level of wear for making that choice).

Decals will look great, but they come at the cost of the original art and some of the character of the machine. That said, it's all a good learning experience and the machine will ultimately be in better shape than I found it.