The cabinet is now safely stored at my friends workshop and hopefully will be getting painted up in the next few weeks. He is doing me a massive favour so naturally it's being fitted in around other work, and of course we need to leave plenty of drying time between coats to allow for flatting back and spraying the next coat.
In the meantime it's time to start getting the other stuff sorted out for when it arrives back. First up I broke out the Dremmel to give the transformer mounts a bit of a polish up.
Both my original brackets and the ones that
@BigIan kindly donated were caked up in some horrible brown substance. I'm told that it's a lacquer that the transformer is dipped into during the manufacturing process. Well I can say for sure that it's a proper nightmare to get off.
I ended up using the Dremmel with both black and white compounds to get these polished up. The black is more agressive so I used that to remove the majority of the lacquer before then giving it a final going over with white and then finally some autosol to get it shining a bit more. Not quite the mirror finish i'd have liked but still a million times better than how they looked before. I also gave the mounting bolts which secure the transformer to the cabinet a bit of a polish up too.
Hoping to grab some high-heat spray paint in the next day or two so I can give the transformer block a bit of a spruce up too.
I've also had the ring mounts for the wiring in the dishwasher and they've come out looking cleaner although still quite yellow. Not sure I can do anything about that; I suspect no amount of cleaning will get them back to their original colour, and that's presuming they aren't meant to be the 'aged yellow' that they look. ;-)