from my
first roadtrip to england i brought home my holy grail, the first arcade game i've ever played, the one i've always wanted to have:
MOON PATROLbecause of the long school summer holidays, i have a lot of time on my hands right now to restore this game back to its former glory. enough said
the restoration begins ...overall the cabinet is in pretty good shape (at least at first glance), especially the sides. have a look at those pictures the seller took for me.
everything's there: marquee, bezel, control panel
looking at the sides closely, you can see the usual dips and scratches ...
... and the typical worn corners
pretty bad however is the front panel where once a security bar was installed
both coin doors will get the full powdercoating treatment
an interesting detail can be seen on the front: obviously the guys who stamped in the registration number made an error, so they had to scratch it out and stamp in the correct number. i will "remove" that error during the restoration but try to keep the correct number intact!
i discovered another interesting detail when i removed the lower coin door: obviously a piece of wood from another cabinet was used for the construction of this game - you can still see the artwork on it. does anyone know which game it came from?
on to the control panel
not bad at all, but unfortunately some cigarette burns ...
... along with chunks of the overlay missing!
the joystick (assembly) is rusty and will have to be rebuilt
what i've learned over the years of restoring arcade games is that most damages to the cab result from either no leg levelers or destroyed leg levelers. because of that, most of the time this is the first thing i fix when restoring a game. how are things with the moon patrol cabinet?
i've noticed that the game is difficult to move around, not because it is extremely heavy, but because there seems to be something wrong "underneath" the cab itself. let's investigate
as you can see, the leg levelers and their bases are totally worn out. first of all i thought they were screwed in without any nuts, but when i removed the small pieces of wood which held the leg levelers, i realized that they had been attached the wrong way round, therefore putting the pressure on the wood and not on the nuts themselves!
leg levelers along with their bases removed
woodfiller applied ...
... and sanded down. since it will be covered my the bases and especially since this is the bottom of the cabinet, i don't want to be too anal about small imperfections
the old rusty leg levelers with their wooden bases
i was lucky to find a cheap spare piece of probably the hardest wood around in a home depot and kindly asked one of the assistants to cut out four new firm bases for me - which he did. all this cost me 0.50 euros
i glued on the new bases and secured them with four steel nails each - should be strong enough to support the weight now!
looking much better than what i started with!
finally a wide angle shot of the entire setup
to be continued ...
