Hey there. I had posted over in the forums at KLOV.com asking some questions about Final Fight. Scott at HyperspaceArcade.com happened to have NOS (new old stock) side art and a control panel overlay. I ordered both from them. Here is a pic after putting on the sideart:

final_fight_sideart.jpg

Control panel before:

final_fight_cp_b4.jpg

After I stripped off the original overlay, the control panel looked like swiss cheese. I used Jasco adhesive remover to get the rest of the glue off. It was messy. It is also known to cause cancer in laboratory animals, so its a good thing I’m not one of those!
final_fight_cp_bare.jpg

The holes that I drew arrows pointing towards are the ones that needed to be filled in. I used the method shown on this page on Brian’s site. I had to do it a bit differently though. Some of the holes that needed to be filled were too close to others, and if I put the metal only over the old holes the nuts holding the buttons on underneath would sit crooked. I decided to cover more area then I needed to with metal from the back, and drill through the holes that were staying. That would give me a good base to mount the buttons and joysticks on. If you look at the pic above, I’ve drawn the shapes of the metal backing that I needed to cut. I used a thin sheet of aluminum from Home Depot. Here it is from the back after gluing with epoxy:

final_fight_cp_patched.jpg

I drilled the holes through the patches for the holes that weren’t being patched, and stuck some buttons through them backwards to make a nice edge for the Bondo.

final_fight_cp_pre_bondo.jpg

Speaking of Bondo…

final_fight_cp_bondo.jpg

After sanding:

final_fight_cp_sanded.jpg

Final result after putting the control panel overlay on with 2 new player 1 & 2 buttons:

final_fight_cp_after.jpg

Next step for this will probably be cleaning the cabinet and touching it up a bit, and working on the coin door.