Some Interior Shots

Time for the camera dump! Here are a few interior shots for those who are interested. It was pretty dirty inside and there were leaves, nails and staples all over the place. I cleaned it out pretty good but this is what it used to look like:

The last shot above shows where the original Donkey Kong board sat inside the cabinet. It was mounted vertically on the shelf.

The next shot is from behind looking up - you can see the metal bar which is used to secure the bezel in place. I'm glad this thing came with the cabinet - it is expensive to replace.

This last shot shows the back of the coin box. The holes on the top are where the quarters drop down into the box. There is a drawer on the front which pulls out so the box can be emptied. I'm not sure what to do here - the drawer works just fine but it is a little banged up. I think I'm just going to leave it as is since it would be a lot of work to rebuild something no one will see - plus it is original right now. I' ll post a bunch of pictures of the coin box eventually.

Overall things are in decent shape. I should be able to start filling the holes all over the cabinet and putting on a couple of coats of primer this weekend.

More later

Some Parts Are Here!

Last night when I got home from work there was a package waiting for me from Mike's Arcade containing the buttons, CP strikes, top marquee retainer and the control panel bolts. Here are some pointless pictures of my loot:

The buttons are actually pretty neat. They aren't the standard "Happ" buttons that I'm used to working with - they are actually called Nintendo buttons which is fitting I suppose...

Nothing like fresh metal, eh? I can't believe I had to shell out $17 for this... Oh well, I want to keep it authentic so spray painting an L-bracket just wasn't going to do it.

The next order I place will probably be for the side art, marquee and bezel but I'm going to wait until I actually begin painting.

More later.

Removing The Side Art

I finally started work on this thing! Yesterday it warmed up to about 55 degrees (after snowing the day before!) so I decided to start working on the Donkey Kong. The first thing I did was remove the side art. This was very very time-consuming. The existing side art came off in about an hour per side but it took twice as long to get the glue off - what a pain!

This is what I started with:

Even though the art was mostly peeled off of this side there was still leftover glue all over the place which had to come off.

After reading some threads over at BYOAC, I realized there were several different ways to go about this. Some people use a belt sander with 80 grit sandpaper and just let it eat through the art down to the wood. Other people spray/brush on some chemicals like paint stripper or something and then scrape the art off. I decided to try the third option I read about - a heat gun and lots of patience. It seems to be the least messy way of cleaning up the sides.

I don't have a heat gun but I do have a hair dryer (well, my wife does ) so used that. It worked quite well. I put the hair dryer on "hot" and turned it all the way up. This melted the glue just enough for the art to be peeled off. I started of by gently scraping with the end of a flat head screwdriver and when I got enough of the art up to grab onto I started peeling. It didn't come off all at once - there were lots and lots (and lots) of little pieces to pull off.

After removing the side art it was time to remove all of the excess glue. There was an outline on each side where the side art used to be:

My wife suggested trying Goo Gone which I had never used before. It worked but it took a lot of elbow grease to get rid of all of the glue. The process was spray on the Goo Gone, let it sit for 5 minutes and then rub it off with a cotton rag. This was the key - for some reason paper towels weren't working - at all. Once I switched to the cotton rags I noticed an improvement right away.

If you look close you can see all the glue balled up - this stuff was extremely sticky and was tough to get off of my hands even with a towel. I was constantly running inside the house to wash my hands and then continue (I had to pick up the glue balls with my fingers to get them off of the cabinet). Once I thought everything looked nice, I washed the entire side using soapy water (per the Goo Gone instructions). This was the finishing touch - everything came off!

Here are some final shots of the sides - it doesn't look like much but this was after about 6 hours worth of work.

Nice and clean! Next up - using some bondo to fill all the holes and imperfections. More later.

First Order

The weather is supposed to be nice this weekend so I'm hoping to make a little progress on the cabinet. I'm excited to get started. I placed my first actual order for parts today - I'm going to keep a running tally so I'll have a ballpark idea of what the cost is.

Today's order (from Mike's Arcade):

SKU Code	Description	Price	Quantity	Total
CPSTRIKESN	Nintendo CP Strike Set	$5.00	1	$5.00
CPNINBOLTSET	Nintendo Control Panel Bolts (8)	$10.00	1	$10.00
MBRKTOPN	Nintendo Marquee Top Bracket	$17.00	1	$17.00
TKGU-23-32	Nintendo Orange Button	$5.00	1	$5.00
TKGU-23-31	Nintendo Blue Button	$5.00	2	$10.00
Subtotal:				$47.00
Shipping & Handling:				$11.92
Total:				$58.92

Not too bad I guess - this just about takes care of the parts for the control panel. Also, the top marquee retainer is expensive - too bad it was missing from my cabinet. It came with the bottom one.

More later.