Picked this up at auction last summer for a grand total of $40. She's a dirty girl.

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Glass is toast.

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Displays are questionable.

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Boards look good.

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Cab is good, though the bottom is delaminated.

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Steve Young to the rescue:

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Random parts in the box:

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Missing some stuff:

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Stripped the playfield, almost all the way.

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Going to work through this playfield at the same time as my Blue Max project. Saves time and materials costs to clear coat 2 at once. Wish me luck. My first System 1.

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Thanks for all the kind words and suggestions, everyone!

I'll spare you some of the gory details, but I finished what playfield part removal I'm going to do for this one this weekend.

As I started:
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About the end:
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Eat it, star rollovers (save the inserts, you'll need them later):
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Saves me a chore, mylar was toast:
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After:
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Next, flipped it over and cleaned the shiznat out of the inserts. Qtips and spit, if you're wondering. I also checked them all. They were all still seated in place very securely.
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Next is where we kind of follow my misunderstandings and complete half-assing of the stuff vid1900 lays out in his "ultimate guide to playfield restoration" thread. This is my 4th such attempt. The others turned out beautifully. It should be noted that if you go much farther than this and don't apply new clear coat, you're going to ruin your machine.

First, to make sure that the inserts stay put after we clear coat, I put a bead of epoxy around the lip of the insert and wood interface. Take care not to get any on the lens as you'll be able to see it when it's lit up, especially on clear ones.
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Before flipping it over, I like to put painter's tape over the bottom of all the playfield penetrations to keep stuff, polish, clear, etc. from dripping down and getting all over everything.
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Finally, here's where we start with a bare playfield:
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Hit it with naphtha to clean all the surface dirt, wax, etc. off before starting more aggressive negotiations. Round 1, 2, and 3.
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Then started the fun part. I've done this a number of times and this game fought me the entire way. It had been rode hard. The ball swirls are all the way down into the paint. Poor thing. It was brutal. Can you tell which half I did before deciding I was tired and giving up for the day??
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Be careful when finding out that the ball swirls actually go all the way through the clear coat into the paint. Wipe, good. Wipe, oooh, pretty. Wipe, great! Wipe, oh, shit, bare wood. At least it's, like, not in the center of the playfield where people will notice it. I think I'm going to have to take a dremel to the bonus ladder inserts. They're just not coming clean and the uneven discoloration is driving me nuts.
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We'll finish the other half next time.

Old clear coat all over my hands. Badge of honor!!
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I'll check them again. They all seemed to be pretty well seated, but better safe than sorry. I didn't get too aggressive trying to push them out.

Haha. It's on the list. Last weekend it was in the 20s outside and there's no heat in the garage. I was being lazy. The weekend before that, I participated in the Houston Marathon Weekend events. It was just exhausting as I forgot to train for it.

Hopefully I'll get out there this weekend and make some more progress. I have a plan to fix all the missing paint, but I've never tried to get that in depth with repairing paint before. We'll see how bad I can mess it up.

I hope so! I'm having a bit of a tough time making a decision. I've heard a rumor that new playfields may or may not, maybe be in production. I could do that or I could spend 30 hours fixing this and it'd still look like crap.

Managed to do a little work this weekend. Still not 100% sure where I'm going with this, but she's still a dirty girl.

Cleans up nice, kinda:
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After cleaning the whole playfield:
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It's hard to get a picture of what I'm talking about. The ball swirls are all the way through the paint. All over the playfield. Short of re-painting the whole thing, I'm not really sure how to make it look decent:

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This is what I call, "Good Enough for the Girls We're Datin'."

Should have laid down a layer of clear first, but the in-laws were in town and I needed more than an hour in the garage.

First, took a couple scans incase I messed it up and to re-make stencils for the lettering later.

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Fun with "frisket". This stuff works good for cabinet stencils, and came up without taking any paint with it.

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After cleaning it about a hundred times, laying down the frisket, and cutting everything out.

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Put down the white. Now, the white went on and dried about 10 shades "bright ass whiter" than it looked like it would out of the bottle. Baby girl needs a tan, but, you know, see the first sentence of this post.

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Frisket removed. I wish I'd done some of the yellow at the top before I removed it, but oh well. It's only a little more $$ to put another layer of frisket down and fix the yellow towards the top.

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Then I went around and repainted in a whole bunch of black. Not bad.

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Side by side.

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Next time we'll finish the rest of it and prepare to start clearing.

Also, forgot to add. Before doing the touch up stuff, I used a Dremel to clean all the old crap off the tops of the inserts. Not recommended. Pop them out and use sand paper. They don't look great.

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I've actually been dreading this. It didn't cause any problems last time I used it to paint a cabinet, but that's a different kind of paint. We'll see what happens.

Had a nice 4 hour mess trying to get this to work. I've seen others have some good results, but I need practice. Hopefully this will work out for me! Took so long, I ran out of time to actually paint.

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Fun on Easter Weekend.

Used the stencils to put the numbers back in. Moral of this story is to clear before you use these stencils. They pull chunks of paint off. Ugh.

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I touched up a few more areas. I suck at matching colors and the f-ing paints keep drying significantly different shades than they go on. So what the hell. Most of the bad parts will be covered by plastics, aprons, and skirts. But this is never going to look perfect. I'll probably just mess it up more if I keep going.

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Now the fun part.

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First coat and leveling inserts.

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The next day. Inserts need another round of leveling. Sanding to level stuff out.

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Coat number 2. Use pennies to level out your playfield before coating and insert leveling. It'll save headaches.

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After coat number 2.

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More to come!

Not a lot of time to work this weekend, some sick kiddos! But got a few things.

Mainly, I masked off the circles and sprayed them black. Still figuring out the stencil thing. They're hard to place because you can't see through them!

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Keylines look reasonably good. However, the freaking stencils left some adhesive behind. Not sure if it is because it interacted with the clear or I left them on too long, but it's really upsetting. I used some alcohol and a rag to get most of it off, but it smeared and removed some of the black paint. Sucks.

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After 3rd coat.

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Ready for 4th coat.

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After 4th coat.

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Final sanding ladder.

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After 320.

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After 600.

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After 1000.

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After 1500.

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After 2000.

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After 3000.

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We'll do the final buff and wax after the 6 week cure time has elapsed. I can also start testing/rebuilding boards and getting the cabinet back in shape.