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.