Cabinet Restoration

[OnigumO]

Hi, I recently picked up an arcade cabinet and its in pretty bad shape, but hey I got it for free.  After reading about restoration jobs other people have done, I decided to try to restore this cabinet but I have no experience in this kind of thing.  I wanted to know what are recommended paint remover products and a good product to fill up dent/gashes in the wood, and a good brand of paint/primer.  Any response will be greatly appreciated and Thank you for the time taken to read this.

[creatine28]

What type of paint are you trying to remove?  I used some stuff from HomDepot that removes only Latex paint.    Here's the message link of my post!

http://www.arcadecontrols.org/yabbse/index.php?board=1;action=display;threadid=7440

[mahuti]

I've found lots of good information at tutankham.com

Stencilling
http://www.tutankham.com/stencil/stencil.htm

Painting
[ulr]http://www.tutankham.com/painting.htm[/url]

Cleaners
http://www.tutankham.com/cleaners.htm

Techniques
http://www.tutankham.com/tech.htm

Personally, I like to use bondo for fills and major fixes.

[OnigumO]

Bondo huh? Can you find this at home depot? And I just checked bondo's website and they have many types of bondo, which one is the one to get for wood?  Thanks.

[mahuti]

You can go to pretty much ANY hardware store and buy bondo. It's a plastic filler, comes in a can with separate activator. If you ask for it by name, most hardware guys will point you to it, or something like it. It's typically used on cars, but works great on cabinets.

http://www.bondo-online.com/catalog_item.asp?itemNbr=176

That's what it looks like. You might need some spreaders too.

http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/diy_main/pg_diy.jsp?CNTTYPE=PROD_META&CNTKEY=Products_1%2fPaint_543%2fPatch-Repair_546%2fMiscellaneous+Repair_6700&BV_SessionID=@@@@1314667616.1054940654@@@@&BV_EngineID=ccceadcihldfhdgcgelceffdfgidgkk.0&MID=29

It's a 2 part filler / activator. You put some filler in the cup that comes with it, mix in activator, voila... quickly hardening plastic. You can layer, and layer, and layer and have no problems with strength. It is somewhat brittle, but for filling stuff that doensn't bend (like arcade cabinets and car bodies) it's fantastic. Just don't put too much on at one time, or it won't harden correctly. I find it to be pretty easy to work with. On small fills, alot of people use wood putty. I don't like it though, because it I don't think it bonds as well, or sands as well as bondo.

You can check out the link in my sig... you'll see lots of bondo. You can even rebuild big gaps, holes and broken edges.... just have to take your time to do it. I used it to rebuild a place where an old lock was torn off the door, and left a big silver dollar sized half circle. The wood in that area had several corners and contours and I was able to build them back to their original shape with some exacto's, utility nives and a dremel (and my orbital sander). I'm not some big wood worker... I just picked it up as I went along and it turned out better than I could have hoped.