Every cabinet restoration starts the same way: you find something in a garage, a storage unit, or the back room of a bar that’s closing, and it looks rough. Water rings on the base, side art peeling like sunburn, a marquee gone the color of weak tea. The good news is that arcade cabinets were built to be serviceable — plywood boxes with standardized hardware — which means almost anything short of structural rot can be brought back.
Assess Before You Touch Anything
Start with a full inventory: cabinet structure, monitor and chassis, control panel and wiring harness, PCB (if included), power supply, and artwork. Water damage at the base is the most common structural issue, since decades of spilled drinks and mop water wick into the plywood or particleboard from the bottom up. Press a screwdriver handle into any soft or discolored wood — if it sinks in, that section needs to be cut out and replaced with new 3/4″ plywood, not just painted over.
Stripping and Repairing the Cabinet
Original cabinet art is usually a printed laminate or vinyl decal applied directly to the wood, so removing it typically means sanding down to bare wood or, if you’re lucky, peeling intact sheets that can be preserved for reference. Fill dings and screw holes with wood filler, sand smooth, and prime before repainting. This is also the point to check and re-glue any loose joints — most cabinets are held together with a combination of screws, glue, and corner blocks that loosen over decades of being wheeled around and bumped.
T-Molding: The Small Detail That Makes a Big Difference
That colored plastic strip running around the edge of the cabinet is called T-molding, and it’s sold by the roll in a standard 3/4″ or 1″ width in dozens of colors. Old T-molding gets brittle and snaps off in chunks. Removing it means pulling the old strip and its staples, and installing new molding is easiest with a heat gun to soften the plastic slightly so it seats into the routed groove without cracking. It’s a genuinely satisfying, high-visual-impact repair for the amount of effort involved.
Replacing Artwork
Reproduction side art, control panel overlays, and bezels are available from specialty print shops that cater to the restoration hobby, printed on weather-resistant vinyl that holds up far better than the original 1980s stock ever did. Measure twice before ordering — cabinet dimensions vary slightly between manufacturers and even between production runs of the “same” game, so a reproduction meant for a Midway upright won’t necessarily fit a Bally cabinet cleanly.
Controls and Electronics
While the cabinet is stripped down is the ideal time to service or replace worn joysticks and buttons — this is also a natural point to source upgraded parts if the originals are too far gone, since replacement Japanese-style or American-style controls are widely available and drop into the same standard cutouts. Inspect the wiring harness for cracked insulation and test continuity before powering anything up.
Final Assembly
- Reinstall the monitor chassis and test the picture before buttoning up the back.
- Mount fresh or restored control panel overlay and hardware.
- Reattach T-molding and any marquee retainer clips.
- Do a full burn-in test — several hours of powered-on time — before calling the restoration complete.
A full restoration can run anywhere from a weekend touch-up to a multi-month project depending on how far gone the piece was when you found it, but there’s nothing quite like watching a machine that looked destined for a dumpster light back up in your garage exactly as it did the day it left the factory.