Every once in a while a restoration comes along that has it all, a tremendous resurrection of an extremely rare machine designed by my favorite game designer..  In this case, SUNDANCE.  This is the story of an extremely rare Vectorbeam Sundance that a fellow collector purchased from Ebay. Apparently this machine sat out in a field under a tarp for years before hitting ebay. This has been my most extreme restoration attempt to date.

This is how the game arrived from the shipper. The guy dropping it off wanted me to ‘look at it’ because it has no bottom!  He was afraid i’d reject it and was pretty shocked that I was actually happy to see it

Here’s a quick picture that should give you an idea how severe the damage really is. I’ve seen water damage and wood rot plenty of times, but never wood rotted completely away! The cabinet is actually missing not only the bottom, but the bottom 4 inches as well.  This game is just a huge mold fest, the cabinet is not salvageable

You can see that after the original wood rotted away it left some broken formica behind.. This is what I used to calculate the actual height of the game and figure out what was missing. Thankfully one of the square corners still existed.

Shopping List

2 sheets of Melamine board
2 sheets of ultra thin laminate
1 sheet of pressboard
20 feet of T-molding
Assorted paints, adhesives etc.
Laminate trim bits

Total Price: $180.00

The first part to restore was the front kickpanel.  Because the length of the original formica was present, I carefully pried what was left off of the front of the game and reapplied it to a fresh new piece of wood.  The missing areas were bondo’d flat and feathered in with black paint.

Next, I used my melamine board and my router to make an exact copy of the side panels of the game. I do this by clamping the new wood to the old wood and using it as a guide for the router. Once I have one side I sand the edges just a touch to make smooth corners. This method allows for an identical copy of the original side.  All of the blocking is applied the same way as the original in the same locations.

Some more details I removed and re-adhesived all the original stickers found on the cabinet and placed them in the same location on the new parts.

Now that all the parts are made, it’s time to begin assembly. I lay the cabinet on the ground and air-staple the parts together one by one, testing for level and square on each one. From there, I lay the other side on top and nail that.  All of the parts are cloned from the original cabinet and installed in the exact same location.

Forgot to take some pictures of this part.. I installed black laminate on the outsides of the cabinet using contact adhesive. This is not normal formica as it is about 1/3 the thickness of the formica you see at home depot.  It is called ‘vertical grade’ and due to how thin it is, the stuff is extremely fragile. Cuts easily with a trim router.

Starting to reassemble the cabinet. You can start to see that I recycled as many of the original parts as I could.  I even used original staples where I could..

Nearly complete! Finally stood up the new cabinet today! Still need to cut the paper bezel and transfer over all the original electronics.

All the electronics are put back, hand cut a brand new bezel. Managed to get the boards working, the game now plays blind!  Now off to it’s owner in california.  The rarest of the Skelly games has come back from the dead!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Cool Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.