Thank you both Mike and Andrew.
I have a lot of practice with masking tape from all kinds of ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- with surfboard work so I'm not afraid, but I can't say I have done any real stencil work actually.
Pretty fun to see the result once you have thought it through.
I don't do so poorly with it but I learned a lot watching my buddy Gavin who has been painting boards for 40 years- and he is actually an artist with the stuff.
The circles for the Williams W's were actually a trace of a peanut jar lid I found that was the right diameter and the rest is all straight tape pulls with a little protractor and tape measure work.
I like the custom stencil job.
The coin door will complete the look.
I heard back from someone who believes he has a 3 slot Williams door he will sell me but needs to check his storage collection after the holiday weekend.
I'm stoked. That really will complete the machine.
I have really wanted to have a machine (other than the Rush twins) that at least LOOKED like a normal cabinet to someone who knows what they are looking at (and me!)- so I think I may actually pull it off with this one.
And of course both of you guys are right about the screen mounting (which became VERY apparent when I tried to figure out the easiest means to pull off a legitimate bezel) so here we go.
An artifact of surfboard building... I love making templates after I spend time engineering ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---.
Seemed like it made sense to at least have a starting point for future reference since I live in an arcade CRT desert so now I can make mounts for the 3 other machines I need to build pretty easily.
I wrestled my heavy duty brackets out of place with the screen still where it belongs and crammed the new stuff into place.
The result:
Satisfying because it is still modular enough to allow for the inevitable screen swap in the future (as long as I live that long) and I learned how I can do it really easily for future builds now too.
The next few pics are pretty mundane, but if in the interest of maintenance you haven't tried beadle wraps and zip ties to staples yet I highly recommend them for the appropriate spots.
Because of how I mounted this consumer tube here it required dismantling the mounting system for the degauss circuit, and since I am planning on replacing this monitor at some point I wanted to continue with the whole theme of being something I could disassemble/reassemble with no drama or re-engineering.
And if you haven't discovered a staple gun for insulated cables yet you are missing out.
What is even better for future maintenance is to set a staple on its own and then anchor wires to it with a cable tie for easy removal/replacement in the future.
This Gardner Bender stapler I got for making some stuff faster with electrical install work is great fun for machine building.
Not sure about you all, but I'm ready for a third MaiTai and a little Defender humiliation-
Dammit Eugene!!!