X-men 4-player cabinet Restoration/Conversion

Arcade Collecting > Restorations & repair

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opt2not:
:cheers: thanks, pbj.

Quick update. Made more progress in the last couple days.
Got this cab stripped and revealed a lot of bondo work already done to it:

Proceeded to do my own bondo'ing:

I'm about to finish up the sanding, and wanna start laying down primer on the sides tonight. Hopefully by mid-week it'll be ready for artwork (which I'm still undecided about).

More, real soon...

opt2not:
Alright, I finished shaping all the bondo tonight and the corners turned out well:

(PS. new leg levelers are on route)

The kick base was swiss cheese from having all manner of security bars installed on it.. it took a bit of time for this area:

After one more fill and shape session, the cab was looking a lot more crispy:

It got late on me, but my scheduled goal was to have this cabinet repaired and primed by the end of this weekend, so I threw on a single coat of primer.

I'll give it another layer of primer and sanding tomorrow, but till then I figured I'd gain some ground with the CP. Took it apart and stripped it as well, the box -- I'm keeping -- but the CP top needs to be replaced. I forgot to take a picture, but its got the same cracked situation as the cab's kick base, and I cannot live with my cab knowing the CP had a crack in the middle.

Anyway the box needs some bondo work to sharpen up the edges, but also there are a few extra holes in the back that need to be filled:

I'll bondo it tomorrow...after I cut the t-molding slots in the newly attached corners.

Mike A:
nice work. You are moving fast.

opt2not:
Thanks Mike, I'm trying to get it all wrapped up in 3 weeks! If I can get all the construction tasks done by the end of this weekend, I'll then have a bunch of time to work on the internals. I've got a spare K7000 that I'm tuning up for this, and I'll have to build a new PSU block and make sure all my wiring is correct. I'll need at least a good solid week for that.
Not sure if I'll salvage the original JAMMA loom in there, I have to assess if it's still good, it was a rat's nest of wires when I took it out of the cab.

opt2not:
I've come to a decision to convert this cabinet to a dedicated 4-player X-men, with possibly running a switcher in it for my other Konami beat-em-up PCB's. The reason being is that I've always loved the X-men arcade game since they first came out in the arcade. I was a big comic nerd BITD, and attribute a lot of my art influences to Jim Lee (as well as artist and game designer Akira Yasuda aka Akiman, of Street Fighter 2 fame).
Jim Lee worked on the 90's version of the X-men comic, and is responsible for one of the greatest comic book cover art of all time.

So I'll be putting in an order for a full-set of reproduction art from one of the cabinet art vendors in the next day or so. I'm still trying to decide to go with This Old Game, or Gameongrafix.

My goal of having the cabinet's painting done by Wednesday is looking good. Tonight I finished the rest of the sanding needed, then gone ahead and set up the paint booth and started the spraying:

The cabinet, CP box, and marquee brackets all got a nice coating of Satin Black:

Much better than swiss cheese:

While the paint is drying I decided to take a look at the coin doors. They're actually in pretty good shape! Enough that I'm not going to bother restoring them, and a quick cleaning was enough to call them good:

I'll have to order some of the missing parts; the coin reject buttons and frames, and one of the return chute frames. I found the old reject buttons at the bottom of the cabinet, but they're thrashed and have been painted over. These are cheap and available, so I might as well buy new ones.

One of the return chute frames is cracked, again probably from vandalism, so I'll have to replace that as well.

The last addition to the construction phase that I forgot to do before painting is to install a bottom brace beam for the CP to screw down into. These Konami cabs had 3 points to attach your CP to, 2 on the inside side panels, and 1 directly down into this small bracing piece of wood:

Since the cabinet was cracked right where that piece would have been, and re-enforced with a bracing beam, I'll have to attach a separate piece of wood that doesn't put pressure on the kick base panel. That shouldn't be too bad, I'll probably tackle that on the weekend.

Tomorrow I'm going to clean-up the workspace, then start working on getting the monitor up and running.

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