OutRun Mini Restoration

The back story: I bought this cabinet through a contact on a newsgroup back in 1997 (when I was just 17!) It cost me £200. The cabinet was in use at a youth club, so I got it direct from a long service. 

Here's a picture I took in 1997 when the cabinet arrived:

A few photos of the machine today:

The game worked fine in 1997 and I played it for a year or so. I visited one of Sega's spare distributors (Deith Leisure I think) and bought a few parts... back when they still had a few OutRun spares knocking about! I then went to University, graduated, moved and didn't have space for OutRun. 

As you can see, some lunatic spray painted most of the cabinet black including the Control Panel. Unfortunately they'd covered the original Mini red side art. I've no idea why this was done, as the cabinet isn't in that bad condition. It's scruffy, but not awful.

By 2014, this spray paint, which was done directly over the vinyl is flaking off and looks awful. The spray paint is scrapped off before moving the cabinet as it's a messy job.

Looks pretty dreadful whilst being done. The red art had bonded to the spray paint, so restoring it wouldn't have been feasible. 

The end result is pretty good though, leaving a smooth surface with the exception of some pre-existing blemishes and dents to the cabinet. The below image looks a lot worse than it is, but clearly this is a work in progress!

Anyway... at this point (about 6 weeks ago) the cabinet is now in my spare room. 

Ha! What a fool I was. I hadn't accounted for the fact that many of the bolts would be seized and horrendously difficult to remove. 

The accelerator pedal bolts were so rusty, you couldn't really see them 

No amount of WD-40 or other trickery was going to remove these bolts. Not that I didn't try every trick I could think of. Drilling them was the only option.

I hit a similar problem with the base-board. Now the base-board bolts into the bottom of the cabinet via some captive nuts (highlighted in pink below). Unfortunately these nuts had been damaged and were no longer secured in the bottom of the cabinet. I decided to turn the cabinet on its side and hold the captive nuts in place whilst turning the bolts.

It also turned out that the bolt thread was trashed, where these bolts had poked through the bottom and caught on the floor. This cabinet really wasn't put together very well in the first place.

I could have taken the cabinet outside to angle grind the nuts off. But being winter, this wasn't a practical option. So I spent an hour hacksawing off both bolts.

Yes, I had to remove the hacksaw blade due to the tightness to the cabinet and slowly cut these off. 

1/ WD-40 Specialist Penetrant

2/ Wait

3/ Wire brush the Screws/Bolts

4/ Attempt to turn with Vice Grip Pliers

5/ Repeat as many times as necessary. Up to 5 or so iterations.

Anyway, after hours of this the front plate comes away - revealing treasure!

I'd already found 2 x 20ps doing this restoration. Now I add to the collection a 2p, a new 5p and the old 5p which went out of circulation in 1990 ;)

A serious amount of crap falls out when this plate is removed.

The first side plate is also removed. Interestingly this reveals the original artwork hidden under the plate.

Now, if you remember I had a huge amount of difficulty removing the bolts that held the accelerator pedal in place. In the above picture you can see the bottom of the slanted piece of wood that these screwed into.

The interesting thing is, the accelerator was not bolted into the captive nuts at all. In fact nothing is. They were screwed directly into the wood slightly below. 

...these cabinets aren't very well made are they!

I'm currently scraping off the rubber matting as the mess above shows.

As they appear to have been mounted twice in my cabinet, it's not clear what the correct position is :)