PBR door is great, if you want to spend the money.

Otherwise, Evaporust, then use wet/dry sandpaper on it. Start at 600, go up to 800, then to 1000. It will take some work and it won't look like new, but it will clean up really nicely.

If you look closely at that door, it already has a lot of vertical scratches in it on the hinge side. In addition, you can see the rust damage in the center section.

When metal rusts, it gets pitted. You can polish that with chrome polish, Brasso, what have you, until the end of time, and you'll never remove the pitting damage the rust has caused, or take the scratches out. The only way to remove those scratches and help mitigate the pitting caused by the rust is abrasives.

When you start with the more abrasive 600 paper, which is actually categorized as a fine sandpaper itself, you're going to have some scratching. But as you progress up to the superfine level, even up to about 1000-1500 grit, those are basically going to polish out with the paper and you'll end up with a smooth, and pretty shiny, surface.

The plating on that door, such as it is, is pretty much toast already. You aren't going to make it much better trying to polish it. It will clean up some, but not to the level you're going to want. I've restored a lot of games with a lot of rusty coin doors, and this has worked great for me. If I can't get them to my satisfaction, I find a better used door. So far, I've never had to buy one of Steve's. I'm sure there's a point where I'll eventually have to do that, but so far, no. Also, this is the exact method I use on siderails and on lockdown bars.

In fact, right now I'm working on a coin door for a Flip a Card I'm restoring. I'll post some pictures of the finished product. It takes some work, you're not going to get this done is 10 minutes.

And finally, as far as scratching goes, this is the method car restorers use to polish out newly refinished cars. They use polish and buff at the end, but up to that point, it's wet sanding with a progression of finer and finer grit paper.

Here's a look at the door at this point. I'm going to work on it a bit more, but it's getting close

The other door is not the same door, but pretty representative of how this door looked when I got it in.

door before (resized).jpgdoor after (resized).jpg

There is a way to get that brushed look back on the raised areas, but I don't have the tool to do that. A lot of that is worn badly by the time we get these doors, so unless you have access to the tool that can produce that look, you're pretty much resigned to just making it look as smooth and shiny as you can.

The inset part of the door is shiny when new, and the Gottlieb logo on there would be white when new. If you look at Steve's doors, you can see it. He sells a paint stick if you want to try and fill that area back in with white. I might try it on this game.

I don't think the original coin doors on Gottlieb games were quite as shiny as Steve's, but it's been so long ago I really can't remember exactly what they looked like when new.

Truthfully, if you get a door that is lightly rusted with no dents or bends on the edges from clowns trying to pry the door open, you're really in pretty good shape. Almost every door I've dealt with has been rusted to some degree, and almost all of them have dents or pry marks on them.