Another Pacman Restoration - In Progress.

JeffC

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Another Pacman Restoration

Hi folks - I've been working on this one for a few weeks now and decided to get a post together. First off, a few disclaimers that will forever destroy my reputation with the purists.

** I've fully jammatized this cab and made it into a 60-1. My original thinking was this: I got into this hobby with the intent of having two or three of my all time favorites in the garage, and that was it. The more I read here, the more I wanted a chance to own and play the classics: Pac, DK, Galaga…etc. I like original cabs, as opposed to MAME or generic multi-cades, so I picked the most original/classic game I could come up with, hence the Pac. I still have all of the original components, but the board, PS and harness have all been replaced.

** I used only spray (can) paint, even on the cabinet, and I know it's sacrilege. I researched a ton of Pac restoration around the web. Talon and Spyridon's restorations with automotive paints are incredible, and Prok has posted lots of good Pac related advice as well. He recommended Krylon Sun Yellow as a perfect match, and was right. I believe the original advice was to use this color, but have it mixed and spray with an HVLP set-up. Krylon has a new can, with a new nozzle that sprays in a two dimensional triangle shape, as opposed to the three dimensional cone shape. I did a bunch of experimenting and found that with careful attention to the speed I moved and distance from the cab, and by allowing just a few minutes between very thin coats, I got a perfectly smooth, even surface. So the yellow and black on the cab are all rattle-canned.

I started off with a Pacman, converted to Pac-Plus, I found on Ebay a mere 90 miles away. It was in the normal, 30 year old beat up shape:
Post01.jpg


Pulled out all of the old components: A Pacman plus marquee, a Galaxian bezel, harness, power supply, and a very burnt monitor. I sanded down the entire cab three times over, going from 60 to 120 to 220 grit, and filled bolt holes and nicks with bondo.
Post02.jpg


Then the paint; again, all spray paint: Two coats of primer, sanding after with a 400 grit paper. Grey for the inside and white for the outside. Then the Sun Yellow for the outside and Satin Black for the inside. Finally a new set of orange T-molding.
Post03.jpg


I added this custom Pac CPO to an arcade-shop multi trackball control panel, along with an Ultimarc 4-way / 8-way switchable joystick, Pacman color themed buttons and a 2 1/4" Happ trackball. Installed a new 19" monitor, new marquee and new bezel. I'm not the creator of the any of these Pac items, but the folks who are and those who helped me get them wish to remain anonymous due to the silly situation with Pac art. They all have my thanks. After sanding and repainting the coin door, speaker grill and marquee brackets, it's all coming together nicely.
Post04.jpg


** I call this in-progress because I'm still working on a set of stencils, and have yet to do the art, but I'll get to that soon.

The full set of pictures with more description is here: http://picasaweb.google.com/111266840651647091981/Pacman?feat=directlink

Too long!...thanks much for reading.
 
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Wow...that's great! I'm really thinking of doing the same sort of thing. I really don't have much room for games, so I'll have my 5 "original" games and thought I'd do a 6th to have the games that everyone else wants to play. A Pac is a perfect cab to do it with too! It would be one thing if you were trying to flip it or something, but I see no issue with doing that to a classic if you're keeping it for yourself...plus it was hacked to begin with. Nice job...I may be picking your brain on a similar project in the future.

Derek
 
Looks good, wish my Pac cabinet artwork was as good as yours was. Scanned mine to create the artwork, taking a lot of cleanup to get the missing parts nice. The kick panel is completely useless, going to need to find another cabinet to scan off of.
 
Wow...that's great! I'm really thinking of doing the same sort of thing. I really don't have much room for games, so I'll have my 5 "original" games and thought I'd do a 6th to have the games that everyone else wants to play. A Pac is a perfect cab to do it with too! It would be one thing if you were trying to flip it or something, but I see no issue with doing that to a classic if you're keeping it for yourself...plus it was hacked to begin with. Nice job...I may be picking your brain on a similar project in the future.

Derek

Thanks for the comments. That's my situation exactly. I pretty much have the dedicated games on my want list. I'm now looking to fill the multi requirement. Next for me will be a Street Fighter cab with one of the fighter multi-boards in it, to satisfy the horizontal "misc game" requirement. Then I'd love to do a Mortal Kombat (2 probably) with a multi jamma and a couple version of that game.

Then, way on the horizon if I ever moved to a bigger place would be a Punch Out and Assault, and then I'd be done....yea right.
 
I have the same philosophy as you as far as the games go. I bought a converted Neo Geo cab with a 48 in 1 and am going to replace it with a 60-1. I then bought a dedicated Neo Geo 4 slot because it was one of the systems I always wanted. I have 3 dedicated games I want, a Street Fighter II, a Galaga and a Punch Out. After that, I will call it an arcade and stop there.
 
That's the first time I've seen the "Plus" sideart sticker for that conversion.

Anyone else?
 
Yeah..I've never seen those Pac Plus sideart stickers either...even in a few nos pac plus kits I've seen there were no stickers..interesting..maybe those were early stickers offered to see how kit would do on location or something..
 
Man...I might have a Pac available for this same project...I'll know by wednesday. I'm going to need to get your number on my speed dial. The only JAMMA I know is the stuff I put on my English Muffin!
 
Man...I might have a Pac available for this same project...I'll know by wednesday. I'm going to need to get your number on my speed dial. The only JAMMA I know is the stuff I put on my English Muffin!

I'd be happy to walk you through exactly how I did this Derek. Just about everything I did I learned from folks on this site, so I'll definitely pass it on. I should be able to finish the art this week, and update/finish this thread.

Plus, I'm really interested in getting the "720 Zone Arcade East" completed, after the Pac we'll only need to swap one or two games :) :
Lineup.jpg
 
Yeah...funny how it's sort of worked out that way. I've seen a few others that have several of the same "lineups". It's just sort of weird how I was thinking of doing a multi, then decided a Pac would be a good cab to do it in, and then saw your thread. We'll see...I'll know by tomorrow if I've got a donor Pac or not. The only way my wife might let me do it if it requires little to no effort and little to no money ;)
 
The thing that keeps me from doing a pac resto is the side art...I cant live without sideart and the stencil thing looks like a complete PIA!

BTW, your resto on this cab is very nice man!!
 
Alright; I finally got through the stencil job and got my pictures together for an update to this post. The art was definitely a lot of work, but its very rewarding to peel off the final stencil and see the finished pictures underneath. Again I have to thank Talon and Spyridon for their Pac restoration posts and picture sets. I read them thoroughly and used many of the tips.

So as I mentioned before I'd done everything up to this point with regular spray cans mainly because I don't have a compressor and don't see myself ever doing something like this again. I'd read about difficulties using stencils with roller or brush painting, so I knew I wanted to spray. I picked up the best color matches I could find at Home Depot, and decided to try the Preval aerosol spray set-up which I purchased from Ace Hardware. It definitely took some practice, and some trial and error, but in the end I was able to spray these paints on extremely smooth. I would never recommend doing an entire cab with these, but for stencil work they're perfect.

Edit: I realized later that I actually switched my red to Behr "Red Hot", which was a slightly better match.
PostPaint.jpg


First up was the two red stencils for the sides. I applied these like dry side art as recommended in the other posts mentioned above. The went on very easily. I sprayed a coat of white primer under all of the red and blue just to ensure the colors weren't changed by the under coats.
PostA.jpg


Next up was blue. The stencils were transparent which made it easy to ensure they were lined up. Of course just matching up the registration marks worked perfectly. Again I started with a coat of white, then two coats of color. Below is a close-up of the blue for the 'C'. The spray system I used got a very smooth coat with almost no orange peel. Once the blue stencils came off it started to look like a Pac.
PostG.jpg

PostH.jpg


Next up was the front red stencil, and finally the black. For black I went back to regular Krylon spray paint.
PostC.jpg
 
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And finally the good part: Removing the final black stencils. The blue ghost on the front was the first thing I revealed. I had to touch up the mouth with blue to correct a mis-placed stencil, and am still thinking of filling in the lower part of the "C" with red. There were tons of tiny stencil pieces to remove.
PostE.jpg

PostF.jpg


I still need to figure out what I'm going to do about a clear-coat, and get everything reassembled, but its nice to finally see the side-art.
All of my pictures are here: http://picasaweb.google.com/111266840651647091981/Pacman?feat=directlink
 
That looks awesome. Great pics too, thanks for sharing. I've got a set of stencils on the way for my own Pac project, so your post is helpful and motivational. :)

That Preval thing looks interesting. Did you have to thin the paint for it? What type of primer did you use during stenciling?
 
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