Restoration mistakes you've made ?

Malice95

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Donor 2011
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So over the past year I've started restoring my machines.. A multi-williams
in a restored joust cabinet, a Berzerk, the latest is a Black Hole Pinball. Each
time I made mistakes and found ways to correct them.

My latest...

I royally screwed up he playfield on my black hole last night. I was curing the
Upper playfield clear coat with an infrared heat lamp and I put it too close..
Clear overheated, shrunk, and cracked down to the wood ruining the
playfield. A big and costly screwup but I'll replace it and move forward. I'm
too far into the restoration to stop now.

Now I know I am far from alone in the "Restoration mistakes" dept. We all
love to post the glorious money shots of the final restoration but I rarely read
about the mistakes that occur along the way. Since none of us do
restoration for a living, I'm sure there are plenty that people dont talk about.

What are some of your biggest ones? We're all human.
 
I'm rebuilding a water ruined Atari cocktail and routed out one of the more complicated panels, then cut the F'n holes on the wrong side. Grrr.... could have been a lot worse, but still a dumb mistake. The golden rule = check/measure twice, cut once.

BTW, me thinks you're going to get a lot of broken vector tube horror stories. :(
 
Well, if you haven't read my Pac Man restoration thread, you missed a big one. I had begun spraying rather than rolling my cabs about 1-2 years back. Pacman was my 3rd spray job. Everything seemed to be going OK, but after 5 coats, it didn't seem like the gun was laying down enough paint. I tried cleaning the filter multiple times, but it still seemed to be clogged. Decided to buy a new one. Went to the hardware store where I bought the gun, they were completely sold out of the filters. Went back home, tried to clean it one more time, still seemed to be clogged. Decided I would spray without a filter. Huge mistake. The paint went on so beautifully at first I wondered why I hadn't pulled the filter sooner. I was looking at a smooth, perfect butter cream yellow cabinet:

P5010571.jpg


Then it started. First I noticed cabinet-wide runs starting. 2-3 foot wide cascades of paint. Painfully slow avalanches of paint. Lethargic Lava Flows of paint. There must have been 4-5 of these paint runs, looking like a sea of ocean breakers on a shallow coast. I shoulda known then the paint was on too thick to cure properly, but I went ahead anyway. Put down the first stencil layer and pulled it immediately after the paint went down. Everything went fine until I got 2/3's of the way down. Then it happened. A swath of the base coat about 10 inches wide and 3-4 inches high peeled off with the stencil. Right down to the primer:

SSL11970.jpg


I tried to mask just that area and fix it, but every time I'd test the edge with masking tape, more paint would peel off. I finally realized that in addition to the paint being on too thick, I had also sanded the auto primer too smooth, and there was no tooth left for the top coats to cling too. I ended up scraping that entire side of paint:

SSL11974.jpg


I decided to take a deep breath, wait several months and then when I wasn't so emotional and pissed off, I'd start completely over on just that one side:

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Once it was caught up to the other side, I continued the process and finished the stencilling within a few short weeks. It sucked, but I am so glad I just let it sit for a while and then came back to finish it properly. It is now complete, beautiful and the most played machine in my arcade at the moment:

DSC01096.jpg


The end.
 
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Waaay too many to document. I keep trying to remember the rule "the perfect is the enemy of the good"...but my OCD keeps me from adhering to it :)

Repeat offenders I just keep doing:

"If I spray paint it just once more, it will look perfect": paint runs

Routing new Tmolding slot: router somehow goes off tangent

"Must remove paint/adhesive from plastic": adhesive remover eats plastic

"Must touchup that pinhole in marquee": giant opaque paint blob

"Just need to sand that a little more": sanded too much

"Ready for primer and paint": did not sand enough

Two dropped glasses (EM Shooter, plain sheet from another), two broken neck vector tubes, etc.
 
#1 Realizing after the cost of restoring the machine is quite a bit more than what I could have bought a nice working machine for. :(

But what fun is that i guess? Plus you have plenty of stories about how you brought the game back from death. :)
 
#1 Realizing after the cost of restoring the machine is quite a bit more than what I could have bought a nice working machine for. :(

But what fun is that i guess? Plus you have plenty of stories about how you brought the game back from death. :)

I am just starting to learn that lesson...

Oh, and leaving legs on a newly replaced cap and firing it up.
 
I got this as my fortune today with my chinese lunch. Ironic huh?

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I've made a few mistakes applying artwork, that seems to be my downfall. I've had to redo (and hence, repurchase) a couple of control panel overlays. I also messed up one side-art installation, causing me to be completely anal about the whole thing, remove the botched side-art, re-paint, and re-install a completely new set.
 
I think the worst I've done so far was swapping monitors between my Neo Geo and my Rampage World Tour, only to discover in a rather exciting fashion that Rampage doesn't have an isolation transformer in it.
 
The mistake I always make is not saying no when I see a machine in need of restoration. I have about 1projects in my garage. Now my garage is so full, I don't have any room to work on them!
 
The mistake I always make is not saying no when I see a machine in need of restoration. I have about 1projects in my garage. Now my garage is so full, I don't have any room to work on them!

1 projects and your garage is full? Is your garage actually a phone booth?
 
Spending 20 hours stripping the paint off the original laminate only to realize 75% of the wya through that there was actually a good reason why someone painted it in the first place.
 
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