Arcade Collecting > Restorations & repair

Dragon's Lair Restoration

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More Cowbell:
Dragon’s Lair was one of my absolute favorite games back in the day. I know a lot of people hate it but I thought it was just the greatest. Lots of good memories associated with it. I’ve kept my eyes open for a cabinet to buy or restore for a long time and nothing has ever presented itself to me. I listed a WTB thread at KLOV and someone somewhat local came through with a DL that had been converted to a Ghosts & Goblins. I made the 50+ mile drive to pick it up and found it to be in pretty rough shape. That’s ok, I don’t mind putting that kind of work into it, especially since I got it for $40! It is solid overall but it has some really rough spots that need some major bondo work done. Also, the lower marquee was cut off to allow for the straight marquee of G&G as opposed to the dimensional marquee of DL. Since the weather was extremely cold for the last week or so here in Chicago, my wife was nice enough to allow the cabinet into our living room so that I could work on it over a nice long weekend (Thursday through Monday). So if you see drapes in the background, that’s why. I took it back into the garage each time I sanded.

More Cowbell:
I started by cleaning the cab out (mouse nests) and removing the control panel, coin door, marquee, lower marquee, and coin box. I noticed the coin box had some crumbly tape that said Ghosts & Goblins on it. The tape came off and under it was Dragons Lair in sharpie. Same goes with pulling off the cpo, there’s some DL peeking through under there. Exciting! Anticipation growing! I decided that there was no saving the side vinyl so my son and I started stripping it off. He lost interest after 5 minutes and I was left to pick tiny bits of vinyl off the sides for several hours. There’s no easy way to do it. I tried a heat gun but that didn’t speed it up much and left glue residue behind. I finally ended up using a razor blade scraper which left some gouges but I figured I could fix that up later. Once the sides were stripped I got down to bondo-ing the rough spots. I scraped the chunked up areas out to get any loose debris or loose wood out. On the biggest area I decided to drill some holes and put some pegs in to give the bondo something more to grab onto. I probably should have done larger pegs but at least it was something. Bondo is kind of tough to work with for me so I like to build it up. A few layers and I had the holes filled. I did this for the area by the control panel and the top and bottom corners (all on the left side). Of course it looks like crap until you sand it, then you start to see it coming into shape.

More Cowbell:
While waiting for bondo to harden, I worked on the control panel. One of the latches had come apart from the control panel and someone in the past drilled some holes to attach a new latch. I also had some extra holes that needed filling. I bought something called JB Weld hoping that it would do a good job of being a permanent adhesive. Man that stuff gets pretty damn permanent! I “welded” some pieces of acrylic under the holes and “welded” the latch onto the control panel. Wait 12 hours or so and they are not going anywhere (I hope). Filled the holes with bondo and sanded. Nice and smooth. Once the bondo hardened on the cabinet, I took it out to the garage for a good sanding. I used a rotary sander and it worked great. There were some places that I had to go back and refill due to some bubbles or areas I just plain missed. I also filled all of the gouges on the side with spackle and sanded that as well. Those weren’t very deep so I didn’t mind using the weaker stuff for that.

More Cowbell:
Then I got to work on the coin door. I know a lot of people strip everything down to the bare metal when doing restores, but I tend to take the easy route. Since it was in good shape except for the paint, I decided just to repaint. I cleaned it thoroughly to get any loose paint off and covered the coin acceptors (red plastic) with painter’s tape. I also covered the lock for some reason, since I’ll be replacing the lock, I’m not sure where my head was when I spent the time on that. I use a spray paint from Ace Hardware called something like Rust Eze or Rust something. It’s made specifically to go over rusty stuff. It’s nice and thick so it covers bad paint well and holds together even if some of the surface won’t let it adhere as well. The pic I took is after only an hour or so of drying so it looks a little uneven. It looks perfect in real life. I have a Cinematronics sticker coming from Cysnake over at KLOV which will look great back on the coin door.

More Cowbell:
Somewhere over the weekend, I found time to cut the lower marquee. I used the old one as a template for width, but used the Jakobud plans to determine the angle of cuts for the front. I have heard that the Jakobud plans aren’t perfect so I took the leap of faith that at least this part was right. It worked out and the angles look good compared to the upper marquee. I attached blocking to the lower marquee piece and screwed it into place. If it needs to be removed and adjusted, it will be easy to do so, just 6 screws holding it in place. Once that was in, I decided it was time to start painting. I had a quart of primer tinted as darkly as possible and started the whole thing off with a layer of that. I just did that last night so I’ll likely sand it tonight and give it another coat of primer if it needs it. You may have noticed that I didn’t replace the textured vinyl. I’m not concerned that this cabinet is 100% accurate to the original as I’m going to be running Daphne on it. I left the internal wiring in tact in case future generations want to restore it 100%, but all there was inside was wiring so it would have been difficult to replace the other laser disc elements. It’s been a blast to get it looking like it does now compared to where it started and I can’t wait to really get going on the rest. I have sideart, marquee, and cpo on their way.

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