X-men 4-player cabinet Restoration/Conversion

Arcade Collecting > Restorations & repair

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opt2not:
Did some shopping today:

Pretty happy I got a Trim Router w/ bit set, and a second-hand shop vac. Arroyo recommended another Trim Router that had a Tilt Base for angled routing, but I was able to find this Bosch router that also has a Tilt Base attachment that I'll order online for cheap. I've always liked Bosch tools.

Started working on the cabinet stripping phase. Did I mention how happy I am now that I have a work space again? :gobama

For posterity, this is what I'm starting with:

Removed everything except the monitor frame, because getting it out is a ---smurfette--- if you don't have a long shaft socket driver. It's easier to just unscrew the 4 accessible front bolts and remove the tube by itself.

Upon removing the coin doors, I found this fun surprise:

Yup, it's a crack! Full through. Someone must have tried to kick in this front panel, probably out of some failed attempt at theft. Maybe that's why it's called a Kick Panel... :lol
Whoever worked on this cabinet ended up just bolting a support beam to the back and called it a day:

Putting pressure on it does reveal some bend to the broken area :banghead:, as if it wouldn't take much to crack it through and take the support beam with it.

Now i gotta decide if I want to pull this kick panel out, trace it out with my new Trim Router, and re-install it. That's a hefty task that I might take on after my party in a month, but for now I'm going to just fill it and paint over it like it's not there.

The bottom corners have damage:

This could be repairable with bondo alone, I'll try that first, but if that fails I bought the dowel rods and have some spare wood to attach a shaped piece as a transplant.

The other front corner isn't too bad for repair:

Standard frayed bottom edges you see on a lot of older cabinets that have been on-route, bondo will fix this right up:

Gonna order some new leg levelers too.

I started the citristrip process to get the paint and gunk off the sides:

I'm going for a 24 hours soak and have found covering the citristrip with plastic helps let it work more efficiently.

I'll let that marinate till tomorrow, then I'll remove it and the rest of the paint, see what I get underneath -- probably whatever vinyl side art was originally under there. If there is vinyl I'll just take a heat gun to it and remove it down to the bare particle board.

Just for fun, here's another shot at this amazing side art installation:

It's such pain in the dick because the packing tape's adhesive has gotten really strong over the years, so ripping the tape off isn't so easy. I have to use Goo Gone to get it off, and that's a arduous effort that I wasn't really planning. Oh well, I'm still confident I can get this presentable and playable in < month.

pbj:
Soak a rag in lighter fluid and lay it down on that packing tape. It'll lift right off when you get back to it in a few hours.

opt2not:
Good tip. Thanks man :cheers:

opt2not:
Late night (early morning) update. I mentioned earlier this is going to be an aggressive schedule. It doesn't help that I don't have a lot of time during the week due to work and dad life -- this is why I'm a night owl, I get time to myself starting at 10:30pm till whenever I'm tired. Isolated me-time is vital to my mental health!

Tonight I only started me-time at 11pm because of some house chores I needed to handle first. But this train is moving, and it can't be stopped!

Having let the citristrip marinate for 24 hours, I proceeded to remove the plastic from the cabinet.

This is why I love the plastic cover wrap technique, a good bulk of the paint comes off with the plastic when you remove it, saving you a chunk of clean-up time:

This is just from pulling the plastic:

What's the deal with this cabinet?? It looks like it was an original Simpsons cab, despite what the homie Malenko said about single speaker grill cabinets being TMNT's. But what I can't wrap my head around is that the original side-art was painted over, then these shoddy decal cut-outs of Simpsons side art was package taped on top. What was the point of that? Strange...

Anyway, next I busted out my heat gun and started removing the beat-up original side-art:

For those who haven't gone through a restoration like this, the reason you have to remove the paint first, instead of just heat-gunning the side-art trying to peel off the paint and vinyl at the same time is because the heat gun will absolutely burn the paint a lot sooner than the vinyl. It also could be many layers of paint, rendering it difficult to remove the vinyl underneath. So make sure you clear the paint before attempting to remove vinyl side-art!

After getting all the original side-art off, I attacked this side with my orbital sander and some 80 grit sandpaper to take off as much of the leftovers as possible:

Now it's a lot more clear of what I need to bondo/wood fill.

There's still some remaining paint near the monitor area, but I'll deal with that after I treat the other side.

Continuing on, the citri-wrap-marinade is in full effect:

I'll let this sit for another 24 hours, or close to, then do the same treatment as the first side.

I'm still trying to decide what to ultimately do to this cab. Do I restore it to a Simpsons? Do I convert it to another Konami 4-player game? Or make it a multi beat-em-up cabinet?

In my PCB collection I currently have 4-player versions of Simpsons, X-men, and Bucky O' Hare. Simpsons is a 2-button game, and is pretty popular. X-men and Bucky are 3-button games, and while X-men is definitely a popular game, Bucky is very rare and obscure. But it's a very cool and different game.

I do have to factor in off-loading value, as anyone who's been in this hobby for a long time, you have to think about trade value and what items can lead you to what other items. Not everything in this hobby will be with you forever, and it's good to plan ahead and be self-aware that at some point in the future you may have to offload your cabinets.

Since I have multiple PCB's of The Simpsons now, one potential possibility is to trade one for a TMNT or TMNT:TiT and make this cabinet a 4-pcb Konami Beat-em-up-apolooza. I'll mull it over.
More progress tomorrow. I wanna have both sides ready for Bondo/wood filler before the weekend so I can tackle that task during the day when I can properly run power tools and not piss off the neighbours.

Time to sleep. :o

pbj:
It was probably a Simpsons, converted to something else when the board went weird, and then converted back to Simpsons with a working board later.

:dunno

Looking good, though.

:cheers:

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