Restoration woes

[menace]

In the words of forrest gump--an arcade cabinet is like a box of chocolates...you never know what you are going to get until you take toluene to the sides (loosely paraphrased of course)

anyways, here's the before and after for my galaxian cab--we discovered that the artwork underneath was in rough shape before we stripped off the latex and that with this type of artwork some of the colors bonded to the latex overcoat more than other (green and yellow in particular)  Also, it turns out there is no artwork on the other side, just bare wood so a restoration in this case involves buying sideart no matter what.   My conclusion, I'm going to strip of the vinyl with this artwork on it, paint it white and wait till i can afford full sideart...I was so disappointed

[menace]

and after  

[SirPeale]

That's pretty much what I'm doing with mine, for the same reason.  I'm going to stain the wood on mine though.

[paigeoliver]

Good call on the staining, I stripped and stained a Galaxian cabinet once and it looked awesome.

[Gamecab]

I picked up a strange looking cab last night.  Upon stripping the paint I realized it was a Missile Command Cab.  I spent most of today stripping the paint but I think I will have to go the route of buying the replacement vinyl.  I still have the other side which is black.  Does anyone have a suggestion on what the best stripper would be for an oil based paint?  Although I plan to replace both side, I would like to use this as practice for the next cab I restore as I think my inital paint stripping may have caused some of the damage.

Charlie