Saturday, March 28, 2015

Job 2: Refinish the Cabinet


By this time I'm an old pro at cabinet refinishing. Step 1: take it all apart. This time it was a little harder, because the chimes, coin door and tilt mechanisms are hardwired to the rest of the cabinet mechanics.


This is the inside mechanical guts of the machine, removed from the cabinet. You can see the coin door on the right, the playfield is propped up against the wall and the newly-refinished head on the left, with its backglass.

The rest of the cabinet is in the workshop.




Check out how clean this cabinet is, even before restoration! Normally, the inside front is stained with spilled soda and accumulated dust, spiderwebs and gunk, but this is the cleanest old machine I've seen! 

Step 2 is to remove the lock bar hardware, plunger and side rails.



You can see the original finish that was under the metal side rails. This machine was well-taken care of, but it could't escape the telltale ravages of time and probably spent its early years in a venue that allowed smoking.

Anyhoo, it was all coming off with the sander.


Boom! Blank cabinet.  Next, it gets filled, primed and painted.


Beautiful!  I created stencils in the same manner as the head and applied them with a light coat of adhesive spray.




Next, the blue:


And the final reveal:




So pretty! Side rails, plunger and hardware go back on...



...followed by the re-installation of the cabinet mechs, coin door, tilt mechanism and chimes unit.  Job complete!

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