Looking awesome as always
Cheers buddy.
That marquee is great. You gotta be chuffed to get that thing onto the cabinet.
Home stretch, man!
I think we are down to a race to the finish eh? Looking forward to some Shapeshifter updates. And yes I was pretty chuffed this came out how I had in my head.
Crisp!
Thanks brotha!
Always cool to see the level of work that the crew here is creating.
That looks really nice
Thanks Bobby, ditto.
man... this just keeps me coming back for more.. and more.. and more. Great job!!
Now I'm blushing. Thanks Scotty_C.
Tick tock...
That looks amazing... LOVE IT!!!
Cheers, appreciate it!
Arroyo does good work.
Whoa, an OND sighting. Good to hear from you bud, you are missed around here.
Man I am overdue for a write up.
So I left off with the CP needing a lot of work.
1st step was getting the Ms. Pac-Man universal mounting plates installed. I did this on my little CP and liked it a lot. This allows me to swap joysticks by embedding these plates into the wood:
Rout out the exact dimensions with a template and make it snug in the wood (details posted previously):
Then mount wood:
And repeat
These will get some #6 screws epoxied to the countersunk holes and allow swapping sticks to be easy. I didn’t take a lot of pics of the flight stick routing out, but same idea different dimensions although I went a little deeper to allow a dust washer to sit under the Acrylic layers. I also cut a hole for the TurboTwist High/Low spinner which requires an odd shape. I just did a circle and then cut out a lip for the microswitches that stick out so they would fit.
Next was the graphics for the marquee. I hadn’t been totally happy with the little CP I built. The problem was that because the graphic wasn’t adhered to the acrylic above it there were tiny particles that could get in-between the graphic layer and the acrylic on top. In addition there was occasional rainbow effect from the light bouncing off the surface of the graphic print and hitting the acrylic:
To solve this I learned about “Facemounting” (there’s a joke in there somewhere), which is a technique I tried on the dust washer of the little CP but hadn’t tried on a large scale. Basically it is a double sided adhesive applied to an ultra thin layer of plastic. It’s called “Optically Clear Adhesive” and it’s made by Dry-Tac. This permanently adheres the graphic directly to the acrylic and looks the same as if the graphic was printed directly to the acrylic.
Getting it on though isn’t so easy. Here is the recommended way to do it in a series of videos:
There’s actually a ton of good information in that including ways to cut acrylic and their properties. I would watch all 6 videos if you are interested in the technique.
It does recommend some heavy duty equipment, and I didn’t have any of that, but a guy online did it by hand (
) so I figured why not:
First applied to the acrylic going VERY slowly and making sure no bubbles. I was really concerned about dust, but bubbles ended being a bigger deal. One guy suggested online steaming a bathroom, then wait a few minutes then boom, clean room.
Doesn’t look like much but that’s the clear adhesive being applied by the hand technique to the acrylic which has a blue mask on the other side.
Once that went on was onto the graphics. Same technique but graphic facing down:
I should mention that I used J rollers and laminate rollers to press as hard as I could after it was applied to get any remaining bubbles out. When I took it off there will still some. I worked on it for awhile and got most out but still some remained:
What’s really weird is that I left it there for a couple of days and those somehow magically disappeared:
Cut the acrylic to match the laser etched piece (with tracksaw).
Then it was routing out the grooves where the two pieces of acrylic would sit:
Took careful measuring to make sure all 4 sides lined up perfect.
Then fit it in:
I was ready to do the same to the CP graphics but knew I needed a machine so I ordered the cheapest laminator Dry-Tac has…..didn’t go well, or at least shipping didn’t:
Hopefully they will send me a new one quickly.
In the mean time I figured I would get the lighting for the Marquee finished up while I am waiting. Same as before, the little cool white 5mm LED strips taped to the etched Acrylic:
And lit:
And I am chuffed:
That’s all for now. I’m on a deadline.