I recently found a Twin Bill. The cabinet was painted a lovely granite like color—luckily it came off pretty well and the original paint was relatively intact with just a few gouges and scratches in the cabinet (which were presumably the reason for the paint over). Took a long time to remove the paint!
The playfield was touched up long ago with some lacquer that had yellowed considerably and looked awful, but it cleaned up nicely too. It looks too like someone long ago lacquered a few areas on the back of the backglass where it was beginning to flake—it’s not noticeable from the front and appears to have served its purpose as the backglass looks pretty decent.
The previous owner mentioned it needed to be “rewired” (which frightened me), but he meant that it just needed a new power cord. Otherwise, it had some severely stuck steppers, a few broken leaf switches, some disconnected wires, and some switches in need of adjustment. It now plays well and strong, although I just noticed that the game counter doesn’t count up and so one more thing to fix.
Otherwise, all seems original except for one of the rollovers which is red instead of white. I have a new one that I could replace it with, but it’s too white compared to the other four original ones and so I’ll wait to see if I can come across an old one. Anyone got a spare?
I don’t like touching up or redoing cabinets, but I have a spare cabinet from a Jockey Club that is in rough shape and so I will give a go at restoring this cabinet and repainting it for Twin Bill. I do have a hvlp sprayer, but will try rattle cans first if I can find reasonable color matches. I don’t think it’ll come out perfect, but it at least makes for a nice fall project. So far I’ve got the JC cabinet sanded down, patched, and glued and the woodrail lacquered (with a touch of shellac on the first coat). Next is creating stencils from the original cabinet.
The game play is quite fun with the dual scoring. It doesn’t have points to score like other machines from the same era (instead of a stepper for points, 10k and 100k scores, it has one 10k and two 100k steppers (one for green score and one for red)), but there are lots of ways of winning replays!
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