The Unrestored Coin Door

I was really lucky when I went to pick up this cabinet - the coin door was in excellent shape! It is the only thing on a Donkey Kong cabinet that you can't buy a reproduction of (to my knowledge) so in order to get everything looking factory fresh you have to find an original and restore it. The problem is that over time they tend to get bent out of shape due to people trying to break in and they all rust due to age and less than ideal storage conditions.

Check out the coin door that came with the cabinet (I still can't believe it was only $36!):

As you can see, the paint is chipping all over the place and there is a considerable amount of rust. However, there are no dents! It is in great shape and once I strip off all of the old paint and rust I can prime and repaint it and the coin door will look brand new! I hope...

Here is a shot of behind the coin door:

The original wiring harness is still there (I'm probably not going to use it) and if you look really close you can see the coin counter!

The coin counter is set to 31,071 which means that while this cabinet was in service it made $7,767.75. Not too bad considering that amount is a quarter at a time! I'm going to look into resetting the coin counter for when I put the finished cabinet in my house so I can keep track of how many games I've played - it's a pretty neat feature.

The next pictures are close-ups of the actual coin mechs:

There are not in great shape and the finish has completely worn down around the coin slot. I'm not sure if I'll be able to restore these to factory condition so I'm contemplating replacing them with similar looking coin mechs from Asahi Seiko. They look like this:

Notice the coin catcher on the bottom is slightly different (the "U" shape vs. the "ear" shape on the original). I'm really undecided right now - they are expensive at $40 each but sure would look nice!

Here are some more pictures of my coin door (yeah, it's overkill but what else am I going to do with them?):

More later.

Random Close-Ups

Here are a few more pictures to give you a better idea of where I'm starting. There are a lot of places which will need to be touched up or filled with bondo and then sanded down before I apply the first coat of primer.

Here is a shot of the speaker grill. The original Donkey Kong only had one speaker mounted on the left underneath the control panel. The sound escapes through the slots that are cut out as you can see. There is minor damage here (chipping) that I will fill with the bondo - the tricky part will be sanding it down evenly. Check out the t-molding slot on the left. It is in great shape!

This next shot shows the other side of the control panel area but this time from above. Unfortunately this cabinet did not come with a control panel at all so I will have to recreate that completely from scratch. It did, however, come with the control panel clips as you can see in the picture. These are what is used to secure the control panel in place.

The last shot below is the marquee area. The hole in the back panel is for the power cord for the light that goes behind the marquee. I am most likely going to be using a NovaMatrix LED Light from GroovyGameGear here instead of a florescent one. The bulbs last way longer and they are easier to power. Along the bottom edge you can also see the metal retainer (it's oxidized over time) which is used to secure the bottom of the marquee and the top of the bezel in place. I'll have to clean that up somehow and repaint it.

More later!