This isn't a full on restoration by any means. It looked and worked good from the time I bought it (original thread in misc arcade
here. But there were some things that bugged me. The first thing I did was to replace the awful looking aluminum foil reflector above the CP with a reflector I made out of chromed poster board. You can read my blog on that project at CoinOpSpace.com
here.
Beyond that, being the anal retentive person that I am, there were some things that bugged me which would take real time and money to correct. The CPO was on crooked (when I first bought it, I took off the CP thinking it was
mounted crooked) and had minor cracking on the front bend. The inner art was damaged (I'm thinking it was original art) and "repaired" by manually painting the lines where necessary. The paint around the inner art was also looking awful. And the art on the upper plastic (the cover for the blacklight + reflector) was extremely faded. So with some Christmas and birthday money from my parents, I decided to order a new CPO, inner art, upper plastic, and "tron" insert for the joystick.
Installing the CPO was easy. Installing the inner art wasn't quite so easy. First, I've never installed side art, and this is probably a bit tougher than side art because you have to cut it
perfectly to fit and then when applying you have obstructions to work around rather than an unobstructed side panel. Plus, I was figuring I could just pull off the old art, and slap on the new. Wrong. It pulled off paint when I tried to goo-gone the adhesive that was left behind. Plus the paint was so damaged to begin with that it really wouldn't have done it justice to leave the paint as is anyway.
One additional thing that came of this was to get the coin door panel (not the door itself, but the wood) repainted. It didn't look bad, but a refresher is always nice, plus I had a hole in it because the prior owner put a credit button there, so this allowed me to fill the hole and paint it black.
On to the "before" and "after" pics...
Pic 1 shows the cracking on the CPO. Pretty minor, but I noticed it and it bugged me.
Pic 2 shows how the CPO is crooked. Look at the blue line along the top.
Pic 3 shows the damaged inner art on the right side.
Pic 4 shows the damaged inner art on the left side, as well as the damaged paint next to it.
Pic 5 is an "after" pic in the dark, that shows one of the side benefits of having gone through this: the background art and the background window both had a film of dust/dirt on them that I cleaned off. Now it is much more vibrant and colorful!
Pic 6 is a closer pic that shows how nice the new inner art looks (as well as the CPO).
Finally, pic 7 is a fully lit pic that shows how nice the CPO looks now that it's not crooked, and the sweet looking upper plastic which made a HUGE difference.