White Galaga Restore

arcadeaction

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Donor 2013-2014
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I like reading others' restore threads so thought I'd share this.

Galaga is a classic. White Galagas are factory converted Bosconians with Galaga art over the Bosconian art... and since I have a Bosconian, I sought one out for a matching pair. It took me quite some time to find this. Seemingly the most common game was the very last on my checklist to obtain.

The situation:
-Game not playing, power supply out.
-Monitor buzzing and blinking like a bad neon sign. Geometry distorted.
-Cabinet flooring was caved in and broken wheels were bolted on. The bottom edges of the MDF cabinet were swelled and fluffed out.
-Glass bezel was missing inch size chunks of paint. Control panel bent and overlay shredded.
-Coin door rusty and spray painted over the 25 cent lights and label.
-Front of cab cracked and entirely painted over with a black and green speckled paint.
-PCB having issues.

The cure:
-Fixed flooring with L-brackets and screws, new casters installed.
-NOS bezel, NOS marquee and NOS control panel overlay obtained for install. Rebuilt joystick and buttons. Rebuilt coin door and mechanisms.
-I recapped and reflowed the k4600 monitor, reconverged it and used monitor strips.
-Cleaned and reseated all PCB chips and installed a switching power supply.
-Managed to save original siding and original side art with touch up pens and paint, and used bondo to reestablish missing chunks on corners and front of game.
-Stripped and painted front of cab back to black and installed new kick plate and kick plate art.
-Cleaned PCB chips and dialed in voltage to finally get a solid playing board. Added the enhancement kit and set it to slow fire default. I was never aware the fast fire version existed until a couple years ago.

As I typed in my KLOV biography when I first joined:
"I can still smell the pizza when playing Galaga from back in the day. Let's keep those memories alive. :)"

Here are photos of some of the steps of the restore process.

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The white cabinet bottom left and right sides were initially spray painted black I think to cover the damage (not shown in photos) and I used a citrus remover to get this off in several applications. The sides and bottom needed a good amount of sanding bondo and white satin paint. L brackets really made the cabinet solid again. I wanted to use and keep as many original parts and just get it looking as good as I could.

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The front of the cab was spray painted with a black and fluorescent green speckle paint. I stripped this all off after maybe 8-10 coatings of things and scraped while watching the Super Bowl. Had to use a good bit of sanding and bondo to fix security bolt holes and a cracked wooden front.

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The control panel: Luckily I picked up an NOS control panel overlay a couple years ago in the event I would have a Galaga one day.

I used the baking method to remove the old CPO. It had been a while since I had made a pan of lasagne, and so I thought I should put the oven to good use. Not sure if this is healthy, but it sure works good. I set the convection oven for 275 degrees I think and let it heat and cook for 10 minutes. I scraped as much as I could until it cooled and then I repeated the process two more times cooking just 5 minutes each time. After, I soaked the panel with some Goo Gone cleaned it and then used a hand drill with a wire wheel to shine it up.

The CPO went on pretty smoothly simply using the buttons and bolts as guides.

I completely disassembled and cleaned the original buttons and put in another original Galaga joystick that seemingly hadn't been used for a great feel.

Sure, you can play Galaga on your cell phone... but using this control panel is like connecting through a portal to another place and time.

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Some before and after comparisons. Of course, the best thing is you can actually play the game now.

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A few shots in the arcade with best buddy Bosconian!

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You have a really nice lineup of midway games there. I like the white galaga, never knew about the bosconian conversions...it's a refreshing change of pace.

Nice work!
 
You have a really nice lineup of midway games there. I like the white galaga, never knew about the bosconian conversions...it's a refreshing change of pace.

Nice work!

You can see the Bosconian art underneath, I really wanted to keep the original side art on there for that purpose of history. Looking inside the two cabs, it is interesting how they broke out pieces of wood etc to fit the vertical monitor in the cabinet that was originally designed to hold a horizontal monitor. It has the Bosconian serial number on it, and the Galaga serial number as well.
 
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