Lethal Weapon 3 semi-restoration

[shardian]

I've had long-winded thread on my troubleshooting of this game. Hopefully, all of that is well behind me. I have my power supply and DMD controller of at a repair person due to some DMD issues, and I have a replacement working 100% CPU board.

The last week or so I have been concentrating on cosmetics. To do:

1. touch up cabinet
2. repaint lockdown bar and siderails
3. Repaint coin door and legs to match lockdown bar (maybe)
4. shop out playfield.

So far, I am about 50% done with cabinet touchups. As you can see from the pics, the backbox is beat to crap. The cabinet has plenty of damage too. I was able to break off a decent chunk of the front laminated piece to get a color match at Home Depot. I went with Semi-gloss, but should have went with high gloss. The match is very good, but the ever so slight difference in sheen is noticeable in the right light.
One of the reasons I say "semi-restoration" is because I am not filling most of the gouges in the cabinet. I'm just painting it. Why? Because its frikkin DE Lethal Weapon!! It will be lightyears better than what it was, and it will look quite good to the casual eye.

I stripped and repainted the lock bar last weekend. The crappy weather is keeping me from doing the side rails yet.

I hope to have the cosmetics wrapped up by the end of the coming weekend in time for my boards getting back. Then I will commence tearing down the playfield.

The playfield is in excellent condition. It just needs a good polish. I have all new drops and standup targets. Everything else will get cleaned and of course new rubbers, lamps, and pinballs.

Much like the pacman cocktail though, It will be hitting the road pretty much as soon as I put the glass back on.

Here are pictures of what it looked like when I got it.

 

[shardian]

Here's some progress pics on the backbox. The left side wasn't near as bad as the right, so I just touched up the blue. If you look really close, you can see slight differences in the blue. That is because I used semi-gloss instead of gloss. Oh well. I doubt anyone will be inspecting this from a foot away.
I've also included a picture closeup of the left side to show the 'smear' effect some of the damage has caused. It's on the agenda to touch these areas up better.

 

[shardian]

The right side was missing a good amount of paint and detail. I used the left side as a reference and rebuilt the missing art. I took a shortcut in a red/orange area at the top and just made it black. For posterity sake, I did the same on the left side. It was all smeared anyways. I did a complete repaint of the blue area so it would be even. No stencils or anything, just a handful of varying paint brushes and a steady hand.

I need to work on matching the detail colors still. I've been using acrylics and I just don't care for them. I'll try a bit more, then probably switch to testor's.

 

[Geese]

Would you happen to have the paint codes for that color? I have a LW3 that I need the blue for touchup as well, and I don't have a chunk of cabinet that I can tear off and take to Home Depot.

By the way, I have plenty of pictures of my teardown, let me know if you need any.

Mike

 

[shardian]

Here is a pic of the lid. I used Ralph Lauren because they were closing it out at less than half-price.

Take that info to them and they will be able to get you the paint. Remember though - go with full gloss paint if you want a more accurate match. Even then since your machine has different levels of fade than mine it may not be 100% exact. It will be better than matching it with the sample cards. I tried that and there isn't a card that matches it in 3 HUGE color swatch catalogues at the store.

Would you happen to have the paint codes for that color? I have a LW3 that I need the blue for touchup as well, and I don't have a chunk of cabinet that I can tear off and take to Home Depot.

By the way, I have plenty of pictures of my teardown, let me know if you need any.

Mike

 

[shardian]

Today I stripped off all of the front stuff and painted it (gun and coin door). Here is what the front looks like after giving it a good degreasing cleaner. I use goof off 2 as my base cleaner. I keep scrubbing until I see a paint streak on the paper towel. This insures all of the crap gets off, and also gives me the added benefit of a better paint match.

 

[shardian]

Note to others thinking about working on DE games: the side rails are attached by two bolts...and heavy duty double sided tape the entire length! I bent the crap out of the first rail before I realized what was happening. I tried to bend it back, and accidentally bent it even worse.

No worries though, I hammered it back to mostly new shape. I ground them down real nice and applied a coat of paint. sanded down with 320 grit and waited to go get a new can of paint. Did I mention I LOVE Rustloeum Universal satin?

Got the new can of paint and went to town...the damn can of paint was faulty. It was spitting all over the place, put down a HORRIBLE splotchy finish, and the can was leaking all over my hand. Now I have to sand it down again and go get a replacement can. Man that pisses me off.

 

[shardian]

Here is the restored front with the painted parts dry fitted. You can see the splotch effect on the lockdown bar.

 

[shardian]

Today I did something I haven't done in a little over 10 years - cracked out my airbrush setup. I've had all of my gear stashed in a box ever since my mom disassembled my work area while I was out of town without asking me. I was pretty pissed and that bullshit event is one of the main reasons I drifted from art as a possible career.

Anyways... I've been wanting to implement my airbrush into my restore work for a while, but couldn't find the damn thing. My wife found my box a few weeks ago and it has been sitting in the upstairs living room. Touching up the orange areas just wasn't working out, so I figured what the hell.

I masked off a side of the backbox and went to town with a bottle of opaque orange I had already. I didn't bother with color matching - I had been unsucessful with acrylics so didn't see the point since I was painting the whole area anyway. The final color is between the orange and red used in the art, so it works IMO.

Damn it felt awkward to use that equipment after all this time. Now that I've done it though, I'm ready to get some of my skills back.

 

[shardian]

No new pictures since no one seems to be paying attention. Figured I'd log some notes for my own record keeping.

Got my boards back from repair guy. Great guy. If anyone needs a good DE board repair person, I can put you in contact with him. DMD controller showed just fine in the test fixture. Power supply had issues in the neg HV section. He replaced a handful of bad components. I'll fire it all up tonight to check everything out and make a list of dead bulbs.

I'm about done with the cabinet work. While some paint was drying I pulled the looping ramp to polish up. I finally found a decent use for that bottle of worthless Mill wax. It works pretty darn good polishing up wire forms. I guess that's the petroleum distillates in it.

I've also come up with an interesting idea for tearing down the playfield. When I do monitor cap kits, I set the cap kit parts list on a piece of styrofoam and poke all of the caps by their label through the paper into the styrofoam. I was thinking today, why not do that with a playfield teardown? I can take an assembly off the playfield and just the mounting screws down in the relatively same spot on a playfield size piece of styrofoam sheeting. It should help me keep everything organized and 'not lost'. Has anyone else ever done something like that?

 

[marlboroa]

i've been keeping track of it. pinball forums are just slow i guess. good work by the way.

 

[Angry_Radish]

I've been following since the beginning as well, just haven't had anything to add

 

[spoonman]

I am following this thread too, waiting for the finished product. I like the idea of a big piece of styro, I might have to try that in the future.

 

[shirkle]

I haven't been on the forums in a few days, so this is the first I've seen it. So far, the restoration looks awesome.
The cabinet was obviously beat to hell....what is the playfield like?

 

[shardian]

playfield is surprisingly good for a game that obviously saw alot of use. There pretty much zero wear, no mylar other than half circles by the slings.

I checked out the insulation foam board crap, and Home Depot wanted way too much. Like $15 for a 1/2" panel!
Instead, I swung by the post office and picked up 8 medium flat rate long boxes. I'll tape them all together to the rough size of the playfield.

 

[WadeLanham]

playfield is surprisingly good for a game that obviously saw alot of use. There pretty much zero wear, no mylar other than half circles by the slings.

I checked out the insulation foam board crap, and Home Depot wanted way too much. Like $15 for a 1/2" panel!
Instead, I swung by the post office and picked up 8 medium flat rate long boxes. I'll tape them all together to the rough size of the playfield.

Dude, there are far more difficult games to reassemble... It's not that hard, just lay the parts on a table in the approximate position. Foam would cause a mess anyway when little bits of it pulled out. I don't even lay them in position and I still manage to get the shit back together correctly. Just ziplock bags of groups of small parts that should go together, and take some digital pics of the confusing/less than obvious stuff!

Wade

 

[shardian]

I taped 6 boxes together. It is working most excellently! I just had to quit because the pop bumpers defeated me. I think I broke the lamp socket on the first one. They looked like quick disconnects inside the socket... I love how pin manufacturers make the pops removable but hard wire the lamp wiring in some annoying way...

And yes, this one is pretty darn easy to disassemble. Just a few hiccups from difficult to remove posts.

As for just setting everything on a table...no way. Now that you have 'little helpers' running around your gameroom I think you will understand why. My work area is the main entrance/exit of the house...EVERYTHING gets messed with.

 

[Angry_Radish]

I ended up doing the 'take a shitload of pics' method, combined with a bunch of ziplocks and small tuperware-ish containers. Another handy thing is labeling with those string and paper tag labels before removing and snap pics so you know exactly what assy goes where.

 

[Geese]

I taped 6 boxes together. It is working most excellently! I just had to quit because the pop bumpers defeated me. I think I broke the lamp socket on the first one. They looked like quick disconnects inside the socket... I love how pin manufacturers make the pops removable but hard wire the lamp wiring in some annoying way...

I just got done dis-assembling and re-assembling a LW3, What I did for the pops was to label each pop body, coul, and switch. Make sure that each body is labeled and it's location under the playfield is labeled. Then label the terminal strip where the black wires for the lights go to. Once that was done, I unsoldered the black wires for the lights, then removed the three coils and three switches from each pop. After that was done, then I removed the pop bodies by undoing the four screws that hold them to the playfield. The bodies then slide out of the playfield nice and easy then. Make sure that the light socets return to the same location, otherwise the wires will not be long enough to get back over to the terminal strip. Oh, and take plenty of pictures after you label everything.

 

[metahugh]

I'm at the point now where I take lots of pictures but other than that everything gets thrown into a box. Once you do a few back to back its not a big deal.