“Space Rider” The pin that Bally never made

So I have acquired a Geiger Space Ride conversion playfield to change over a Bally globetrotters. This was a conversion for Bally globetrotter machines in Germany as the basket ball scene was not a huge thing and space themes were more desirable. I have come across two other references and pics of this playfield installed on the interwebs and one for sale ad on pinside last year.

Although this is still a long way away from me actually starting it I thought opening the door for discussion and ideas might help me plan ahead for a few things.
So my preliminary plans are as follows.

-Re-apply adhesive to the bottom of the inserts if required to ensure they are locked down good and hard

-Clear the playfield to lock in all original work

-Make any minor playfield touch-ups as required after first clear has had a month or so to die back.

- Make new undersized rails. I thought a bit more reflection might work well with the playfield so im going to laser cut and bend up some polished stainless steel to actually cap all the rails.

-Evaluate the playfield for possible rewording. What I mean by this is that the playfield still references globetrotter specific things. It appears the right drops have the wording FREE THROW SAUCER VALUE WHEN LIT printed on the playfield along with LIGHTING G.L.O.B.E. WHEN LIT SCORES just below that. Im assuming a possible reason for this wording to be this way is because of possible references to the original user manual sent over with the game. I would like to remove the text FREE THROW and revise the wording from G.L.O.B.E. to S.P.A.C.E. so it matches the inserts around the top middle saucer.

-Review the original plastic and possibly make new ones with the wording also revised as they also reference FREE THROW and SLAM DUNK etc.....

- Revise the pop caps. Get a new set of caps and possibly a new style and remove the existing art and do my own custom designs on the tops.

-Revise the spinner art. Right off the line I had an idea for this. I want to do an astronauts helmet on the front of the spinner and another on the back, but the back one will have a scull showing thru the helmets broken face glass. How does this apply to space rider? I don’t know but I thought it might be cool.

-Paint the cabinet custom colours. The few pics I have seen appears to have random cabinet art as it looks like donor cabs might have been used. My gut at this moment is possibly a red or black cabinet. The black colour has been growing on me because the art will pop more when applied. I would like to bring some of the playfield art to the cabinet sides and would really like to bring one of the astronauts upper torso to the side on the head box.

-For the game mechanics and processing all the original globetrotter items will be reused.

-The game sounds will be revised by using a separate sound board. I have yet to decide if it will be a mp3 or wav board, it might be possibly be 2 to allow an uninterrupted background sound to be played while other sounds are played. I will try to acquire different sounds online and mash them up to hopefully get a pleasing result. 2 speakers will be used if I decide to go with 2 sound boards. Trigger wiring will be off of the existing switches either by doubling them or possibly soldering a second wire set to the switch that will close a loop and trigger the sound boards.

- I have no original backglass so a repo will be purchased but unfortunately it will have grey areas in place of the mirrored areas.

I think my deep down urge is to try to get an end result that feels less like a conversion and more like a possible full release machine from Geiger back in the day.

Thoughts or ideas?