Pac Man Restoration

(Note, I lost the before pictures of the cabinet.....Damn!)

Some quick background about me. I have a Bachelor's in Biomedical Engineering and a Master's in Biomechanical Engineering. I had worked in the paint business throughout high school and several years of undergraduate college. I have worked for Sherwin-Williams, Lowe's, Benjamin-Moore and have sold more than 20 brands of paint for over 8 years. After I left the paint business I never thought all that experience would come in handy, until I started this project.

To start, I stripped the cabinet completely. The wiring harness, power supply, coin door, control panel and anything else bolted, nailed or screwed to the cabinet was removed. All that was left after this was an empty wood cabinet, again, just wood.

The first thing I had to do was match the paint colors on the cabinet. There are 4 colors that make up the art. There is the yellow background, the blue and orange of the art and a black used in borders and the dots going down the side. The yellow was the easiest to match, I just took the back door to a local Sherwin-Williams (Where I used to work) and had them match it. The only color close was in their Industrial Enamel line of finishes. These are professional grade materials used to paint floors and machines in factories and the like. This stuff was only available in gallon cans. The base color was Safety Yellow and it was then modified with some black and green to bring the color closer to the PacMan yellow. The color was much brighter than the yellow left on the cabinet, but when I pulled off the coin door and saw the original, unfaded color, the match was almost perfect. Be warned, this safety yellow is expensive at around $40 a gallon and is only available in gallons. It is and alkyd (Oil Based) product and requires mineral spirits to reduce it or to clean up with. I used all alkyd paints in this project, I still think they work and flow better that the water-borne finished although to some people that is a debatable point.

(Note, the store that matched the paint has lost the original formula. It is just Industrial Enamel safety yellow with some green and black added to "dirty" the color. If you are really interested, send me a self-addressed stamped envelope and I will send you back a sample of the paint to get matched)

The orange and blue I matched in my house using some old color charts I had laying around. (Something I discovered after matching the orange, it is the same color used in the side art of the Tempest cabinet. I had a couple small scratches on the Tempest and touched it up with the PacMan orange and it looked perfect!) I used standard architectural paints or these two colors and was able to get them in quart size, which proved to be more than enough.

Pac Man Orange Sherwin-Williams Decorator Alkyd Base L, Quart

Color	Ounces	32nds	64ths	128ths
R-2	0	0	0	1
R1	2	47	1	1
Black	0	0	0	1
Yellow	0	4	0	0

Pac Man Blue Sherwin-Williams Classic 99 Alkyd S/G Base Z, Quart

Color	Ounces	32nds	64ths	128ths
Blue	0	37	1	1
Green	0	25	1	0
Violet	0	8	0	1

Taking the entire cabinet in and getting it matched is just not feasible. If you don't have color charts to work from you have two options. One is to obtain a sample of the paint and take it in to be matched. You will have to use a knife or similar instrument and cut a sample of the paint off the cabinet. Most paint companies will only match a sample that is bigger than about the size of a dime, and would prefer something about the size of a quarter or bigger. The bigger the sample, the more accurate the match is a general rule to follow. Be careful on how you obtain the sample, the more you take the more you have to repair. You can also try to get color samples from the store. Either go in and load up on the little paper strips or ask for a fan-deck that has all of the colors in it. Most stores will loan them out like a wallpaper book or, if you tell them you are doing a large project or building a house, they will most likely give you one, I know I would when I worked in the business. Get as many samples from as many different paint companies as possible, most places have cross references these days and if you take in a paint color from another company they will mix it for you in their paint. Odds are that someone will have a color that is close enough for you to use. As in the yellow, I chose to use alkyd paints for both the blue and orange. Don't worry about the sheen you choose for these (i.e. flat, gloss, satin, etc.), you will clear coat the entire thing when you are done to achieve a uniform sheen.

The black is just an off the shelf gloss black. I used a polyurethane for this paint as it is a little tougher than a standard alkyd and levels itself out nicely as it dries.

Cabinet Preparation

The first thing I did was to remove all the nails, staples, tape, and other things that had accumulated on the cabinet over the years. I then scrubbed the entire cabinet down with TriSodium Phosphate (TSP). I use a scrub brush and scrubbed away amazing amounts of dirt from the cabinet and then let if dry thoroughly for a couple of days, I can't stress this enough, it must be completely dry before moving on.

The next step was to do the actual wood repair. There are only two types of wood fillers I trust on the market today. The first one is called Miracle Wood and is made from real wood fibers. It replicates the press-board of the Atari cabinets nicely and is easily sanded when it is dry. The other is Minwax Wood Filler. This stuff is like Bondo car body putty in that it is a 2- part system that consists of a resin and a tube of hardener. (I've been known to actually use Bondo for big repairs) You mix the two parts together and then apply it. It sands to a smooth finish when dry and can be drilled, shaped, sanded and generally worked into any shape you need. It is much more expensive than the miracle wood, but I think it is well worth the money.

The next thing I did was to remove all the rotted and peeling wood. I just used a putty knife and scraped as much of the rotten wood away as possible. Any nails heads that had popped out were counter-sunk with a nail set and filled in with wood filler. I then went around and filled in all of the divets and other flaws with the wood filler. On the corners I used some masking tape to hold the material in place while the putty dried. One good hint when working with the Minwax Wood Filler or Bondo: About a minute or two after the filler has start to set it gets to the consistency of modeling clay and is very warm to the touch. At this stage it can easily be trimmed and shaped with a knife. I use this to replicate things like contours and curves. Once the putty hardens completely, it gets so hard that the only way to shape it is to sand it. I use a sanding disk on an electric drill to do all of the sanding, it saves a lot of wear and tear on my hands. I usually start with a relatively coarse sand paper, around a 60 grit, and work to progressively finer papers, ending up with around a 200 grit. You might want to wear a dust mask when sanding the wood filler, I find the dust extremely irritating and it always makes me sneeze. I spent several days just filling and sanding until I had a cabinet that was free from marks and ready for painting.

Painting

The first step to painting is to use a primer on all the bare wood and patched areas. If you fail to use a primer, the paint will soak more into the bare and patched wood areas than the previously painted areas and you will get a crappy result. The primer also helps the paint adhere to the surface so there will be no peeling. At this point let me give a discussion of two different types of "primers", true primers and undercoaters. The terms tend to be interchangeable, but there really is a difference. A primer is meant to be a coat that allows future coats to stick to the substrate. Primers tend to dry very thin and leave little if any film on the surface when dry. Undercoaters are formulated with a higher percentage of solids than the primers and are intended to be sanded when dry. Undercoaters are used on cabinets and the like to fill in any small defects in the wood, such as sanding marks. The undercoater is applied, allowed to dry and then sanded until a uniform, smooth surface is achieved. For video game cabinets I tend to go with the undercoaters as they give a better result. Again I use alkyd undercoaters for this as I find I get a better result. Apply it relatively thick and then sand it smooth when it dries. After I had finished patching the wood, I used the undercoater on all the bare spots and then sanded it smooth with 200 grit sandpaper, after all that I was ready to paint.

I started by painting the yellow background. I used a tape called "Safe Release" made by 3M. It is less tacky than normal masking tape and won't leave a residue or peel off the underlying paint. I used this tape throughout this project. I masked off the background graphics on both sides and the front. I used a 4 inch foam roller to apply the paint. A foam roller gives a finish rivaling a spray, but is much easier to work with. There is nothing wrong with using a spray, I just didn't want to get into it for this project. The Industrial Enamel used for the yellow takes some time to dry and I usually let it dry overnight before working on the cabinet again. It was impossible to mask off all the small graphics in the center of the art. After the main part of the cabinet was painted, I worked in small sections with artist brushes painting the yellow inside the body of the PacMan, and around the lettering at the top. This part was tedious and time consuming, but it was easier than creating a stencil and working on it that way. I spent several days working in small areas and getting all of the yellow painted back on.

The rest of the art was painted on similarly. I worked in small areas and used the tape to frame the area I wanted to paint and applied the paint with a small brush. This technique works great for the small rectangular and square areas such as the ones that make up the lettering on the top and the small orange boxes that appear on the art. I would just tape off a small area such as one rectangle, and then use a wooden wallpaper roller to roll the edges of the tape down so that the paint doesn't bleed under it. This step is very important as simply applying the tape with your fingers will not create a good enough bond to keep the paint from bleeding. For more complicated patterns, I would tape them off to the best of my ability and cut the remaining tape away with a razor blade. In essence I was creating small stencils as I went, using just the tape. I'm sure it is possible to create one large stencil for each color and then just spray through each color, in fact, I'm sure that's how the art was originally applied as the spray marks are still visible. This method was a little beyond me, but if someone did create the stencils I'm sure there would be a great market for them. All in all I spent several weeks working on painting the art a little at a time, and for a few part that were curved I even free-handed the paint a little. I had never attempted anything this complicated before and I just made it up as I went, but as you can see from the picture, the results were well worth it.

For the black dots that run along the side of the cabinet and for the dots in the center of the letters that make up PACMAN along the top of the cabinet I used a q-tip to apply the paint. For the larger dots I would first tap the q-tip on a hard surface to get the tip to mushroom out. After that I just dipped the q-tip in the paint and applied each dot. For the small dots, I didn't mushroom out the q-tip first. Each q-tip was only good for a few dots before it mushroomed out too much and had to be replaced. With a little practice I found I could create uniform dots and, as the picture shows, they look quite nice.

When all the paint was applied it was clear-coated with a product called Varathane made by the Flecto Corp. Varathane is a water-borne clear finish used on floors. It is easy to work with and dries very, very hard. Because it is water-borne, it will not attack the underlying paint as an alkyd polyurethane would. I have used Varathane to protect the side art on a number of games including a Tempest. You can select form several different sheens from sating to high gloss. Apply it with a new foam roller and will give the paint a uniform gloss and protect it from scratching. It will initially go on milky white, but will dry crystal clear in a short time.I use Varathane to coat all of my cabinet art, from stenciled on art of the type found on Atari cabinets, to the sprayed on paint on the Williams cabinet, I have always had great success with it.

The Finishing Touch

After the painting was complete, I replaced the t-molding. The original was orange but I couldn't locate any in orange so I used red. In the end I think the red looks nicer than the orange did. The t-molding was purchased from Mazzco in a 100 foot roll. I just inserted the molding by hand and used a soft rubber mallet to seat it.

I constructed a new backdoor out of a piece of 3/4" plywood. I cut out the vents with a jig saw and then sanded the plywood down until it was fairly smooth. I used an undercoater on the bare wood, sanded it when it was dry and then painted it with the yellow using a foam roller.

The original power supply was shot and I had to construct a new one. The only salvageable part for the original was the step-down transformer, it still worked and after a little cleaning it was used in the new power supply. All of the other power supply parts were located and the power supply was reconstructed exactly as the original had been. Nothing too tricky here, just followed the original schematics and rebuilt the power supply on a new piece of wood. I later mounted the new piece of wood back into the cabinet where the original power supply had been.

I decided not to restore the coin door and instead located a new one. The door sizes were identical, but the new one had 5 volt lights in it. There is not 5 volt DC tap in the PacMan power supply, so I found a small one at an electronics surplus shop for a couple dollars. It is about the size of a pack of cards and works great to power the door lights.

I was able to track down a new monitor, but the original monitor mounts were missing. The monitor mounts are two u-shaped steel members that span the width of the cabinet, the monitor is then bolted to it trough the bottom of the mounts so that the monitor literally hangs from the supports. I was able to construct new mounts using 1-1/8" square steel stock. I drilled the steel to match the mounting patters and they worked great.

The control panel was disassembled and then stripped with a brass brush mounted on an electric drill. The brass brush removed all the old paint, rust and the remaining overlay that couldn't be stripped with a scraper. After the control panel was stripped, it was primed and then painted with a gloss black epoxy spray paint. Here's a trick for better results on your control panels: After the initial coat dries, spray another coat on by holding the can of spray paint a foot or so from the surface. Spray in short bursts, until a textured surface starts to build up. This small texture makes the control panel look much nicer and helps resist scuffs.

After reassembling the control panel and placing an overlay I tracked down, it looked brand new. The two metal pieces used to secure the marquee were similarly stripped and painted.

A new marquee, backglass with all the graphics intact and a new PCB were all tracked down and used to complete the rebuild.

Copyright 2000, James R. Marous