An Ice Cold Basket Case

Summer has flown by and i've had very little time to work on arcade restorations but i thought i'd squeeze this one in before the snow flies. This was acquired many months ago as a working machine but in pretty sad cosmetic shape. I tried peeling the sideart off for reproduction purposes but the heat gun and no amount of patience would get it off in one piece so i gave up and poured on the liquid stripper. The cabinet has alot of bondo on it but the imperfections underneath all that mud are small yet plentiful if that makes any sense. The base is completely rotten however, the rest of the cabinet was spared moisture damage. The glass has very minimal flaking so it should be pretty easy to touch up.

This is one resto that i don't plan on getting too wild on but it should turn out pretty nice when i'm finished. I have a nice (not so 70's) woodgrain vinyl, all the exterior black areas will get new vinyl, everything will be cleaned/painted where necessary and maybe some day an artwork package will be created for it. Until then, it's gonna sit in a semi naked state next to my dartboard in my bar area. Ice Cold Beer anyone?

I applied the bondo to this cabinet many months ago and shoved it back in the corner until the time was right to take it a little further. Stripping the cabinet of all its parts took about 10 minutes, then it was time to taint the neighborhood with some dust. A couple hours/beers later brought it to this point.

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Next up will be a couple coats of black paint. This cabinet has been in my garage a long time and it still smells like a musty old basement. In an attempt to freshen it up, i'm also going to paint the bare surfaces inside the cabinet and hopefully the smell will be gone.






It seems like the blackout paint job should take care of the nasty funk so over the weekend, vinyl installation begins. I'm using a high gloss Sherwin Williams all surface enamel paint on the outside to provide a great base for all the vinyl and a satin finish on the inside. The original vinyl inside the cabinet is in great shape (for once) so i'm leaving it alone, everything else on the outside will either have new black or woodgrain vinyl and of course new t-molding along with repainted coin doors.

You're also getting a sneak peek at a different kind of restoration that's on this winter's menu. Through the hole in the cabinet you can see a pair of Honda Trail 70's, the blue one is a very nice original that belongs to the wife and the red one is mine. Both of these drive but the red one is getting a complete teardown and will return in the spring fully restored. My powdercoater has the correct color for the frame and i have a very large box of new parts that came along with the bike, all of which i paid nothing for.

A little power supply love!



As mentioned earlier, the base was beyond saving. The crappy MDF was swelled to nearly twice its size and the corner blocks were pretty much ready to fall out. All four pieces are new, corner blocks are new and a fresh set of leg levelers finished this little project off. The paint is still wet but in a few hours it should be upright again. Kudos to Taito for trapping the leg leveler t-nuts in between two corner blocks, wish everybody would have done this.



My father in law worked in the automotive adhesives division of 3M for 30+ years and came up with 48" wide roll of this woodgrain vinyl for me, it still had plenty of tack for being old and it applied like butter. This isn't a real close match to the original but honestly i like it better than the original stuff. As luck would have it, the cabinet was shallow enough that i could get both sides from a 6ft long piece.



This is where the story ends for now. At this point, no sideart exists and i'm not thrilled enough with the cpo that exits to tear off my original. All the vinyl on the ouside front/back/sides of the cabinet is new, i touched up the glass, and everything else has been cleaned, polished or painted. It looks good enough to go to the basement and maybe someday the artwork will surface until then, i'll just play it as it is.

It's been a very long time since i've done anything with this blog as i've been waiting for one of the crucial missing pieces to fall into place. I have to give a huge shout out to Audiomidiman for playing a major role in the reproduction of the sideart that's starting to make it's way across the country. Bill has been with me on this project from the very beginning and hundreds of hours on the computer and phone have led to another sucessful classic repro project. Allong with Bill, Rich from This Old Game also gets a large chunk of credit. Multiple conversations, color samples back and forth and alot of time spent in general on his part have also made this possible.

On a final note, there is still one piece of this project that hopefully has a future and that would be a silkscreened control panel overlay. My machine is headed off to California as part of a trade deal that i'll blog about later so it's leaving my collection just before i had the chance to totally finish the restoration. Enjoy your new game Rick!