New Astro City's New Lease On Life

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Hi there AP community! Got this NAC towards the beginning of the year, already have the restore over on Aussie Arcade. Wanted to share the adventure here too.

There are some talented people here on AP , I hope these restore posts are worthy.

Pre-Paint

This poor thing had a hard life here were the problems


-Monitor anti-glare/static coating very patchy all over

-Rust in and around each door

-Surface rust on the monitor frame

-Surface rust on the power supply

-Very filthy inside with nuts/bolts/wire off cuts/random junk like a cigarette packet lolly wrappers and broken quick disconnects all kicking around in the corners and wedged behind the transformer.

-Drink stains down both sides of the front and rear inside shell

-AC wiring looked messy and unsafe and no inline fuse

-Jamma loom and rest of the wiring just filthy everything caked in grime

-One of the mounts where the inlay bolts to the CP was broken off

-Wiring coming off the underside of the Jamma connector worn to bare wire from rubbing on the rough edge of the PCB mounting frame (about 8-9 various wires needed to be spliced here and soldered and heatshrinked)

-Missing screws all over the machine

-Back AC panel was badly bent in one corner in order to access the back AC panel from the rear of the machine it looks like someone had just forcefully bent the panel back because they couldn't be bothered getting a tamperproof tool to get it off correctly.

-The only things that were earthed/grounded were the coin door and coin box, all others non existent & under the CP non populated grounding 2 pin AMP connector

First job was the monitor, the anti-glare/anti static coating had been rubbed off in places all over it looked very unsightly. Went and bought a cheap car buffer from supercheap auto, it came with a terry towel sock pad/microfiber socks and a buffing sock. Got some Auto Glym windscreen/glass polish while i was there and got into it. Dampened the terry towel sock and liberally applied the Auto glym. With quite firm pressure i went over the face of the monitor multiple times until i could see all the purple/pink residue starting to come off. Kept rinsing the sock and repeating until it was all off and then with the buffing sock gave it a final once over, took about 20mins below is the result.

The monitor face looked very clear and flawless now I was happy, the Auto glym even took the swirls and light scratches out of it.

Next wife and I put the cabinet on its back and pulled the CRT and chassis, brushed the entire thing down to remove all the soot/black build up and using a lot of damp paper towels deep cleaned the back of the CRT.


With the monitor and chassis cleaned I was itching to get it cranked up , re-assembled and did and initial power up. It looked quite vibrant and colours were good pre-colour calibration was happy the monitor didn't look to tired at all.

The cabinet stayed like this for a few months now in the living room in this state, I got irritated and decided it wasn't near good enough.

 

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Painting

Sent the power supply and chassis off to the legends at Jomac and gutted the wiring and everything in the bottom cavity of the cabinet, took off the CP and bezel and all doors/hatches marquee light, coin chute etc etc, we pulled the monitor out again and got it into the garage.

Whole cabinet inside and out was wet sanded with 600grit and then washed down and dried. Next was all the plastics/fiberglass material shell with plastic primer quite a few coats (3 or 4) inside and out which was then lightly wet sanded with 600 grit and washed down and dried thoroughly. I masked the front half inside of the shell and re-did the black rear half in gloss black. Let that sit for a few days and then masked the rear inside half and re-did the front inside half of the cabinet in gloss white.



Paints used-

-Dymark acrylic gloss white spray cans from Bunnings (in the end used about 13 cans for the whole operation). Good paint in my opinion this stuff very hard to make it run and you can go heavy with it.
-Duplicolor autospray Gloss black spray cans from supercheap for inside back half of the shell and the power supply (would of been better to get a Dymark equivalent for this one)
-Dulux duramax plastic primer
-Supercheap primer/surfacer for the metal bits



Let this all cure for a few days and then the next mission. The metal doors, bezel, monitor frame, coin box, coin chute, CP and entire outside of the cabinet. Doors were a mess sanded these with 340 grit and primed the bare metal spots, rubbed down the monitor frame and primed that too (forgot to get pics of this) in my haste with the monitor frame i forgot to mask the metal on metal areas and where the frame bolts into the machine fixed this later on as i was putting it back together and sanded all those spots back for ground continuity messed the new paint job up a little in those spots but at this point i'd had enough. CP and bezel were easy same process as the rest of the plastics/fiberglass materials re-did all in again Dymark gloss white.



Entire outside of machine re sprayed quite alot of coats (6-7 cans worth)

Assembled all parts back on and did around 3 more final coats to blend everything in. Few days later wet sanded entire outside and parts with 1200 grit as the finish had quite a rough texture on the plastic/fiberglass ready for polishing in a few weeks.

 

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Re-Assembly and finish up

AC wiring redone and cleaned up a bit with proper screw down connectors (used the heavy duty double screw types to be safe) new noise filter (originals terminals snapped clean off inside their quick disconnects (were white with corrosion). Added an in-line 3A fuse on 240v hot line coming in to the step down transformer. Just a note with the fuse, i ordered a cheap one from eBay and the gauge of the wire wasn't great, went to supercheap and bought one of the inline fuses there with the clear casing, from there i used the thicker gauge wire & its terminals from the supercheap one (pretty much matched the 240v line gauge) and put them in the original smaller screw casing connector and used the original's spring). So pretty much just used the smaller casing to suit smaller fuses and its spring with the super cheap larger gauge wires put in it.

At this point i worked on all the earthing/grounding and made it all reticulated (coin chute/monitor frame/all doors and hinges etc etc) and double checked the existing ground wiring.

Went to Bunnings and got a big sheet of nice 13mm Plywood took my templates with me and got the staff there to cut the plywood sheet up, new PCB mounting boards made.

Everything got re-assembled over a few more days and we got the cabinet back inside. Was pretty excited at this point as this was the first power up with the serviced chassis and power supply from Joe & Sonya, the team at Jomac does a fantastic job and they are really nice people. I thought the monitor was decent before now its very vibrant I was beside myself.

New side art and pretty much the end of the journey here as in the following days I took some more pictures.

The feeling when the entire project was over and sense of relief that washed over me really was amazing I'm really happy I did this and urge anyone who wants to jump in and freshen up a cabinet like this to go for it, this was the first time I've done something on this level and I'm no pro painter but I'm really happy with the result.

 

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Doors Revisited (For the third time)

The day I received the cabinet hurriedly I primed and resprayed these with crappy cheap white export brand spray paint. Amateur stuff I didn't even sand and prepare the surfaces on them, went straight over old paint etc. No idea.


On the initial restore above I learnt a little more, sanded these back to the original paint, primed and tried to get the surface as uniformed as possible, then sprayed with a lot of coats of Dymark Gloss white. I never took the locks off and really should have taken my time here but with the pressure of the whole project I just wanted them 'good enough'. While probably ok at this point for most people I kept procrastinating that I never devoted the time to them like the rest of the cabinet.


I noticed the bare metal parts of the cabinet that I did paint (the coin box & PCB frame) came out really nice and glossy, but the doors weren't great at all, looking at the cheap old locks and how the paint job turned out on the doors, decided to get a set of 5380 locks from Yaton, and while waiting- do these damn doors properly and for the last time.


Under the locks was hiding rust, was glad I did this and discovered the problem. Went and got some paint stripper and back to bare metal. One slather and of this stuff and 10 minutes later did and inital scrape, there were so many coats of paint on these but the first pass got pretty much all of them off, one more slather and pretty much the remaining paint was gone, including the original factory paint. The really tough bits I then took the doors to the laundry sink and with some heavy grit got every scerrik of paint off.



Went up in grits here to 600 and they looked quite uniformed. Just the process now of wax and grease remover, wipe off and prime (hair dryer help at this time weather wasn't great in these few days.)



Got the good old Dymark gloss white out again (I swear I've kept the Dymark factory in business these past months I've bought about 30 cans of the stuff over the whole period.) Few cans worth on the doors this time , I've found with this dymark the more you layer the glossier you'll get, so went pretty heavy on em.

I let all the doors now sit for a good 3 weeks to cure , one thing with polishing the Dymark Gloss white paint, I wouldn't bother, the two smaller doors took the polish well (Nu Finish regular polish not cut and polish) the larger door however, the polish seemed to smear the gloss coat. I was disappointed because I had to (for the 4th time) spray this door. Sanded it back with 600 to get uniformed again, then 5-6 coats more to get that gloss layer back.

I suppose you could call this a single stage paint job, no clear coating/colour sanding I think they turned out as best as I could get, for protection lots of layers over the weeks of 'Bowdens Lazy Wax'.

Cabinet keeps evolving I'm still really happy with what's been achieved, for the future looking into a marquee, get the cabinet running on tokens and some fresh CP wiring.
Thanks for looking and joining me on the experience I had.

-Tom