A bit more progress last weekend... I decided to work on the coin door and front of the cab. I'm not a huge fan of cleaning up/restoring coin doors, but a quick and easy way is to use Rustoleum Hammered Finish spray paint. I've used it plenty of times and I think it's a good alternative to powder coating if the game is only going to be used in the home setting.
I disassembled the coin door down to the parts needed to spray.
With a wire wheel on my drill I began to remove the rust. Even though the rust doesn't look too bad, you will be able to tell how far you need to go with the wire wheel. Unfortunately, this door ended up being pretty bad. The powder coating was just flaking off with barely any pressure. I took it down to the metal on almost the entire door. After removing all of the loose particles, I wiped it down with alcohol and then sprayed it with the paint:
To get a "heavier" texture, you can depress the nozzle on the can just a bit to make the paint sputter out. You can see the larger spots on the drop cloth. It takes some practice to get it right without concentrating the splatter all in the same area. You definitely don't need to do this, as the hammered finish paint looks just fine without this technique.
Some people will then spray the door again with a more black paint, but I always feel like I miss spots with the final black coat and only notice them after I re-assemble and install the door. Ugh. I'm just fine with the lighter shade of "black". Here's the door installed with custom Taito coin reject inserts. I will add a Taito Coin door badge eventually.
Before I re-installed the coin door, I stripped down the front of the cab and took out all of the bolts from the brackets holding the front on and the coin door bucket.
I looked at the front and thought that this would be a perfect time to mask off and repaint the front black area. It would be very easy and it would clean up all of the small knicks and scrapes. So I masked off the stencil area, filled the small divots with wood filler and then used a micro foam roller and black oil based paint thinned just slightly. While the front was drying, I sprayed the black bolt heads, black again and I polished the silver bolt heads.
After a short business trip, I came back 2 days later and was sure that the front would be fully cured. I re-installed the coin bucket, the silver bracket bolts and the coin door. It came out really nice for a quick clean up!