I purchased this broken Castle Newport 500 Grand Prix racing game from eBay for £10. It came boxed, with instructions and the price sticker from Woolworths shows that it was originally £9.99 way back in 1980.

I've never actually seen this game before which is surprising because I was exactly the right age in 1980 for this to have been on my radar. Anyway, as per the auction description, it didn't work so I took it to pieces to find out why.

The case was quite yellow so I decided to retrobright it. I wanted to protect the stickers (which are in very good condition) so opted to use a peroxide cream rather than just putting the case in a liquid bath of peroxide. This worked quite well and the stickers emerged with no damage. I also retrobrighted the bottom half of the case and this really helped to improve the discoloured blue plastic.

It didn't take long to diagnose why the game wasn't working and I was able to repair it by simply bending a piece of metal. Of course, the trick is knowing which piece of metal and how much to bend it :-)

Once reassembled, I gave it a test and quickly discovered that my reactions are nowhere near as good as they were in 1980!

#repair
#asmr
#restoration