Once all of the woodwork was finished we decided to paint it. Nothing fancy here, just flat black paint. Well, maybe we did have trouble deciding between Summer Midnight Black and Raven Craw Black but…
My dad did the painting and took it upon himself to paint the inside as well.
We did learn a hard lesson that the paint will significantly clog the T-mold groove. We will have to re-cut them.
It's really starting to look like a Galaga cabinet now with some paint.
At this point it was time for some finish-type items. Things we realized we needed as we went along that we couldn't/didn't want to make and couldn't really get at the hardware store.
We ordered some rear casters, leveling feet, a marquee light, rear vents/handles, a cam-lock for the back door, and a speaker grill.
Once these arrived we scheduled another evening for work. We had about a week before our goal of Thanksgiving Day.
Here were cutting the holes for the vents/handles. Because we brought the top back panel all the way down to the monitor these will really not vent anything but they do make good hand holds and they look authentic. We will have to add vents a little lower later on.
We masked off the holes and used a orbital saw since the panel is already mounted.
Here we are making s template for the bezel glass. Knowing that the cabinet is probably not totally square and the unorthodox method we will have to mount it this seemed like the best idea. We cut a piece of 1/4 plywood to the exact size and took it to a glass shop. They'll match the template and we should have no problems with it. We wanted glass instead of plexi just because it was clearer, stronger and scratch resistant. We used the router for these cuts since it needed to be exact and I didn't trust any of the saws.
Here was another problem with having the bottom of the cab too high off of the floor, nowhere for the casters to go. GEEZ! If we ever build another one of these it'll take us half the time it's taking on this one because we'll know what NOT to do.
So now we need to build out some support for these casters and it needs to be strong because the sucker is heavy. We have plenty of 3/4 MDF scrap laying around so we made a block, 3 layers thick which was just about the perfect thickness.
Cutting out the area for the wheels to be recessed.
Attaching the support to the bottom of the cabinet.
While we had it laying down we put the feet on. Fortunately they are long enough to reach the bottom without adding more lumber.
And then we realized that it was very late and we didn't have enough time to finish this before our deadline. We revised our goal for the week of Christmas.
Here we are cutting out for the speakers and the grill.
We found some pretty decent computer speakers with a subwoofer laying around my dad's house so we just strapped the 2 smaller speakers in the hole and covered them up with the grill. It's invisible through the grill and sound quite good. The subwoofer is in the bottom with the rest of the computer guts.
Here we made a quick wooden brace for the marquee light and strapped it on with zip ties. Quick, easy and effective.
By this time we were struggling with the lack of space for running cables between the top and bottom of the cabinet. We ended up drilling a hole in the monitor frame to fish the cables through.
I realized at some point way after the monitor was mounted that the angle we had chosen was not quite steep enough. If we had gotten the angle more similar to a Midway cab we would've had a bit more room to work.
By this time we were under the gun to get this thing in some working order. Our family spends a week together in a cabin in the woods for Christmas and our plan was to bring the cabinet for fun. We've got no more time to work on this for awhile so we started getting cute.
Now this one's funny. The original idea was to use wallpaper corners to hold the marquee on. A really great idea I got from the forum here. Unfortunately in this case I didn't think that the top of the cabinet is not a 90 degree angle and is much sharper. These plastic corners won't bend well and with no other way to mount the marquee we used a paint stick with the edge ground down to match the angle. We cut off the excess and panted it.
Doesn't look so hot from the top but from the front you can't tell. Eventually we'll get the proper marquee retainers that take into account the sharper angle.
A little light leaking through the sides here. One more for the punch-list.
The glass we ordered was finished and fits nicely. We just got some clear safety glass from the local glass shop. I would have liked to have gotten an authentic reproduction bezel but the different monitor size prevented this.
We made some wooden supports for the glass to sit. We tried to keep the same angle as the control panel. The whole thing makes a nice plane from the front corner of the control panel to where the glass meets the back of the cabinet. We put some felt strips between the wood and glass to keep it from rattling when your ship blows up.
We even painted the parts of the monitor that were silver but it turns out we didn't really need to. That hand you see is adjusting the leg levelers. You can also see the subwoofer. Nothing fancy but does add quite a bit to the sound quality.
We laid out our own bezel area on the back of the glass and just painted it black. Maybe down the road we can work up some graphics for a bezel but for now we needed to hide all of the unseemly parts holding the monitor in. Looks pretty slick though.
The glass is pretty close to the monitor and after the bezel area was painted you cannot see a thing surrounding the monitor. Again the way we mounted the monitor wasn't exactly authentic to an original which has a couple of inches of space between the glass and monitor. Stuff you don't think about until it's too late to change. It looks good though.
Somewhere earlier we had re-cut the T-molding slots since some paint had gotten in there. Now we installed it and it really adds that arcade look.
So one more late night and we still didn't get quite finished. My parents were leaving for the cabin in two days and I wasn't able to help finish so I left it all to my dad.
He installed the cam lock on the back door.
This require cutting a slot in the monitor frame. Again it would have made life easier to not have that top panel meet the monitor frame. The lock lever could have just slid behind the other panel. To make this even more interesting I bought a lock that was too thin and dad had to recess the hole to make it work. He covered up my mistake well.
He installed the dried bezel. The glass is only retained at the control panel and just sits on the supports. The angle of the rear panel prevents it from coming off. It looks good with the edges showing because they are well polished from the glass shop.
He mounted the control panel from the top side with some screws we painted black. The screws attach to some wooden supports and it is only attached at the sides. The middle is floating but it seems fairly sturdy. If necessary we will make a brace for the middle section later on. This ultimately will depend on what we decide to do on a coin door.
Without a coin door to provide access we couldn't use proper latches to hold the panel as we'd have no way to latch them except through the back. I suppose this would be okay but I think we will put in a proper coin door at some point in the future. For now it's just a blank front.
For the electronics we're using an old PC with Mame and Mala. Nothing unusual here and it is likely to change and evolve so I won't go into detail. It's something we'll play with for awhile and make decisions after we've spent some time with it. It runs Galaga great and that was the main goal.
We drilled a hole for the power cable.
It was a big hit at the cabin
Here it is in it's current state
I'm calling this finished for now. We have some things to add like a coin door and such but it's functioning and looks pretty good. Thanks for looking!
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Topic: Galaga replica scratch father-son project *Complete* (for now) (Read 15326 times)
