I’m almost done restoring the coin door.

It used to look like this.

I stripped everything off of it and hit it with a wire wheel to get all the old paint off.

I then hit it with the orbital sander using 220 grit sand paper to get rid of the scratches from the wire wheel. After that, I hit it with some fine steel wool. I don’t have any pics of that. Next, I did one coat of Rustoleum Satin black spray paint. It looked pretty good, but I guess I didn’t clean it off well enough and had little bits of stuff (steel wool?) in the finish. When I thought it was dry I sanded them off and hit it with another coat. Big mistake…it wrinkled like an old lady (or a young wrinkly lady). The problem was that I didn’t wait the recoat time after sanding it. I also don’t have any pics of this, but picture the alligator handbag that old lady probably has and you’ll get the idea. After sanding, waiting 48 hours, painting some more and finally putting it all back together:

The 25c coin labels were pretty nasty looking.

They were loaded with scratches (like an old lady that has been scratched up). I couldn’t find replacements for these, and there is no easy way to remove the scratches. I scanned one into Photoshop and redrew the “25c”. I then printed it out on my inkjet on glossy photo paper, put a transparency sheet (like for a projector) over it, and cut it out with an x-acto and a ruler. After that, I made a plexiglass, photo paper, and transparency sandwich and taped the edges together. It looks much better and you’d never know it wasn’t original. The pic is a little blurry, but it looks very cool in person. The transparency should protect it and gives it a shiny reflective appearance like new plexiglass.

You couldn’t do this for any Midway doors that have these pieces backlit, but for Pac-Man there was no light so it works good. If anyone needs the file I made to print these let me know.

Today I scored a free game. Free as in zip, zilch, nada, etc.. $0 is a great price, because that’s exactly what I have in my wallet right now thanks to Christmas! I was looking through the RGVAC newsgroup yesterday morning and my timing was good because I spotted a post for a free Moon Patrol cabinet shortly after it was listed. I picked it up from a wicked nice guy who is a collector with no room for this one. It’s beat to hell, but it’s free and a Moon Patrol, and that’s good enough for me. This was not my favorite game, but it was up there. If I remember right I think I used to play this one at an Uncle Tony’s pizza. Mmmmm…Pizza Anyways…

Some bastard painted it black and converted it to an Aliens at one time or another. It still had an Aliens sticker on one side. Black seems to be the color of choice when ruining classic games (it’s the new purple).

This is SUPPOSED to look like this:

It has the absolute most generic marquee you could possibly come up with:

What game is this? Why it’s a “Video” game, of course! Like the monitor wouldn’t have been a big enough clue. :/

I started stripping everything out of the cabinet, and am almost done with that. The monitor bezel was from Stargate, was upside down AND was cut narrower to fit this cabinet. Freakin’ sweet!

The locks were there, but locked and the keys were long gone. I grabbed my drill and drilled the lock out for the coin box. Piece of cake. Coin box was empty though. I went around back and tried drilling the back lock. This lock must have been made out of titanium, because I drilled the crap out of it and it still held firm.

I could not for the life of me figure out how to get this lock off. I spent way too long on this, and then something about 10 inches over to the left caught my eye:

For those of you not familiar with this, it’s a screw, and I’m an idiot.

Here’s the control panel before and after stripping all the crap off:

It looks like swiss cheese now. Lots of holes to plug…should be fun.
Here is what it looks like with almost everything stripped out, and with a new clip on marquee light from home depot

This project HOPEFULLY will be relatively cheap. The guy I got this from had a Moon Patrol board that I bought for $20! I’ll need stencils to repaint the cabinet which I can get for $75, some paint, a marquee, control panel overlay, and monitor bezel. I don’t know if the monitor is any good or not, but I’ll find out when the time comes. It has some burn in but I can probably hide it with smoked plexiglass (Thanks for the tip Mark)

Oh…I almost forgot. It has a wee bit of water damage on the bottom which I’ll need to bondo the crap out of:

Hope everyone reading this had a good Christmas or whatever you do (or don’t do) this time of year. Santa was good to us! My wife got a Simpsons Pinball Party machine. She loves pinball and the Simpsons, so I figured this would be perfect. I had a hard time keeping it a secret, but managed to do it.

It took about 2 hours to wrap, and lots of hot glue for the ribbons to stick. Misty our half cat / half demon spawn is protecting it in this pic. Please note that she is NOT hot glued to the top of the box! (she’s stapled)

It took a long time to get it out of the box! She flipped out when she opened it.

Then the legs were put on…that was a little tricky.

Woo Hoo! Finally got it setup.

Our arcade now looks like this:

As you can see, we are quickly running out of room. We have plans to rearrange some furniture and move these to the other side of the room which is bigger. I’ll post some pics when we do that.

For my Christmas stash - I got training DVDs and books from Randy Fromm, a compressor (so I can spray paint Pac-Man), and a bunch of other cool stuff.

Some more Pac-Man restoration updates should be coming soon. I have parts to order, and have some pics to post of the coin door restoration which is almost done. I’m waiting on some paint to dry so I can do one more coat.

I finished redrawing the front art:

I am very close to running out of things to do on this at the moment. It’s too cold to paint, and I’m not ready for that yet anyway. I still need to get the silkscreening supplies, paint, etc… I may clean up the wiring harness and power supply board next.

Just a quick update on the Pac-Man restoration as its been a few days since I posted. This past Sunday morning I woke up at 5AM for some strange reason, and figured I might as well stay up and get some work done. It’s been too cold to use Bondo in the garage (has to be higher than 45 degrees), so I dragged the cabinet into the cellar and did it in there. I had a window open, but that didn’t stop the entire house from smelling like Bondo for most of the day. A fan probably would have been a good idea.

I brought it back outside, and sanded the bondo smooth. It needed a second coat, which was done and it’s now ready for paint. I’ll have to wait on that until it gets warmer, so Pac-Man won’t be done for a while.

I’m working on redrawing over the scan of the front art, and will post that when it’s done.

We picked up our Kangaroo last night. For any of you out there that have not tried to move a full size Kangaroo, they are ridiculously heavy (duct tape their mouth closed before moving, or you will definitely be bitten).

The seller swapped the monitor out. This one has a little burn in, but not bad and everything is working for the most part. When I first plugged it in, the wife got the first game and whacked a few monkeys into monkey heaven (or monkey hell if they were bad, and these monkeys were very bad). There was no sound, but it was working before we moved it. I wiggled the connector on the sound board and it came back.

The overall condition is pretty good. The side art looks great at first, but when you look closer you can see some scratches through it. Some one scratched a big X through the baby kangaroo on the right side.

Why would they do something like that!? If anything, they should have scratched the damn monkeys! There is no justice in this world.

The game had no keys for the locks in the front, and a missing lock in the back. I had visions of a coin box full of quarters, grabbed my drill and drilled the locks out. I found 2 quarters, and the original manual and schematics stuffed in there. I didn’t hit a jackpot, but at least I don’t need to buy a manual now.

The marquee bulb was burned out, so I figured I would replace it. Upon unscrewing the marquee brackets, I found a former residence of a mouse. MICE ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE INSIDE KANGAROOS! Only baby kangaroos should be in there!

Someday I’ll tackle fixing this up to make it a bit nicer, but for now it stays in the gameroom, which now looks like this:

Last week I won an auction on eBay for a Kangaroo! (the game, not the marsupial). We are definitely going to have to start rearranging furniture soon if this keeps up. I got a good deal on it, and it was listed as working and in good shape. I went to pick it up Monday night, and when the seller powered it up something screwy went wrong with the monitor. That’s about as technical as I can get at this point. It’s my official opinion that something went screwy. It played blind. He shut it off and turned it back on and a little bit of something showed quickly on the screen and then it made a noise that sounded almost like a fuse or something went and then nothing. I’ve heard stories about flybacks going bad, but I didn’t see any visible signs of burning around it.

The guy seemed very nice, and felt bad that it decided to die right when I came to get it. He’s having his friend put in another monitor, and hopefully I’ll be picking it up this weekend. My wife does not care for monkeys. Hopefully this weekend she will be able to punch some in the face.

On a side note, while I was there the seller gave me a tour of his collection and I was amazed. He’s into older games (50s, 60s, 70s), pinball, and especially antique slot machines. The place looked like something that should be in a magazine or on tv. He had a giant 2 floor building with several rooms full of amazing toys. The drive there was worth it just to see them.

Work has slowed a bit on the cabinet due to the temperatures dropping. I’m working in a garage with no heat and insulation, and it’s freezably cold out (thank my wife for that word). Even with the cold, some progress is still being made. I have everything stripped of paint with the exception of the top (scheduled for tomorrow) and the front. I’ll be stripping the front after I get some scans of the art so I can make my stencils and silkscreen for it (cross your fingers on that one ). The sides and the back have been sanded with 60 grit and then 150. Bondo will be next, but I will probably have to drag the cabinet into the house for that as it’s supposed to be at least 45 degrees to harden correctly. You can see some sanding pics in progress below. I think the last one is after 60, as it looks a bit cleaner now then in that pic.

Both sides and the front are stripped now. It is really starting to look like a Pac-Man again!

After this pic, I started sanding it down. I have one side almost done to bare wood. I think that’s it for the night.

I decided (a little late) that I should really empty out the cabinet before I continue to strip the outside and fix it up. I spent some time making a safeback discharger to discharge the monitor, just to be safe. I discharged the monitor, and pulled everything out. It’s all in a big pile in the corner of the garage. Hopefully I can put it all back together somehow.

Nasty ass empty cabinet…complete with 26 years of grime:

I’ll give it a good cleaning tomorrow.

After pulling the monitor, I could get a closer look at it than I did when I bought it. It’s got a lot of burn in. You can make out the words “ice block”, “sno-bee” and “sega”. I threw that in Google and low and behold, I discovered this monitor was used in another life for Pengo. That explains the blue paint. Click the image below to see how it burned into the monitor.

So, it looks like I’m now going to need a new monitor…this is getting expensive. Maybe I can keep this one for testing boards if I can figure out how to make it work standalone.