So what's your story?
I picked this game up real early in my collecting carrier. Way before I discovered EBay, I found personal web site of some guy in Texas, selling a few games auction stile. The deal was to submit your best offer via email and the highest over by a certain date would be the winner. I won, and asked for it to be shipped Forward Air, the choice of arcade collectors before Forward Air made themselves to difficult to ship with.
Unfortunately, Out of around 10 game I have had shipped to date, this one took a beating along its trip. I was saddened to see the control panel rather dented and both sides on the case by the control panel damaged as well.
The Restoration
After letting the game sit for about a year, restoration started but comes in 2 parts. Part one would be some of the obvious. The control panel needed to be replaced and EBay saw to it that I get one! It was complete and had a good overlay so I set it aside for now. Next was the monitor. As you can see from the first day pictures, the monitor, although working, was rather burned. Happ controls provided the monitor I needed.
This ends part one as I put the game back into hibernation for another 8 years!
Now 8 years of more storage is a bad thing. At the time I decided that there were other projects I wanted to tackle. When I pulled this game back out I was looking for a quick fix, literally! I had just finished a game project that had taken over a year and a half, as wanted another game to restore that would not take forever to see the payoff . But as I re-assessed the work left I saw time had not been so kind the Dig Dug. There is quite a bit of water damage towards the back of the case. I’m guessing I never noticed it before as I was not in tune to look for that back in 98 and I can guarantee that I was stored well in a dry environment and always off the floor. Anyway, there really is not fix for damaged partial board when there is no silk screen replacement graphics available, so I moved on.
There were lock bar holes that needed filling, and the “ears” by the control panel were still broken and some other dings that could just some Bondo. The coin door was a complete mess. Normally I furbish dented coin doors, but this one was too rusty to bother with. The back door was a mess as well. Finally, I came to realized that over time I had lost the bottom bracket for the marquee and the bezel for the monitor.
The lock bars were filled with Bondo as were the other damaged chunks. The broken ears were also filled, reshaped and re-roughed for the T molding over the course of a few days. The back door was the easiest needing only a fresh piece of wood spray painted black, and drilled for a new lock.
A friend had given me some used over under coin doors, so I picked a nice one and repainted it for Dig Dug.
Back at the lab, I took a piece of heavy black poster board and using a blue centipede bezel for a template, I recreated to missing Dig Dug bezel. After all the repair, the front part of the machine was repainted black using semi flat black and the repaired side parts were repainted using semi gloss white paint color matched to the white art on the sides.
For this game I needed to:
Replace the back door
Fill a lot of holes
Replace the coin door
Re-key all the locks
Make a new bezel
Repaint some of the cabinet
Make a new marquee bracket
For this game I still need to do:
Nothing at this time
