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| First Time Build - "Chimera" (Completed... mostly) |
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| zeorangr:
--- Quote from: javeryh on December 05, 2021, 08:01:07 pm ---Spring for some glass to cover the monitor if you can. It won’t scratch like acrylic is bound to. Less glare too. --- End quote --- I actually wanted the acrylic because it's supposedly more resilient than glass, and I'm a little gun-shy about trying to protect this screen as much as possible after already busting one 4k TV. Also, while I'm fairly confident of my ability to work with (and cut / shape / sand / etc) the acrylic, I don't know anything about working with glass. That said, I'm definitely open to the idea, and I may look at pursuing that as an 'upgrade' after I've got it finished - it shouldn't be too hard to simply pull the acrylic and put a sheet of glass in it's place. I wonder if I can get safety glass, or something that's composite like a windshield, that's not going to just shatter... or is that overkill? I'll have to start researching that. --- Quote from: Laythe on December 05, 2021, 11:49:56 pm ---Heh, this is cool! Nice take on a multipurpose transforming machine. Shapeshifter rotates the vpin pinball table sideways... Flip lays it down from a hinge at the back down to the floor... and Chimera lifts the layback angle up from the rear while telescoping the CP in and out. Props for coming up with a totally new approach! :cheers: --- End quote --- Thank you Laythe - I really appreciate that! Your work on Mimic was a pretty huge part of the inspiration for this design, though I have to tell you, looking through some of the custom fab work you've done on ShapeShifter makes me feel like I'm over here just banging rocks together. Seriously though - I think I actually ran across Blip! first, and fell in love with the clean design and the dynamic marquee - but after looking through the forums here and also finding Mimic, there was one comment you made in the forum thread on Mimic that that may have sparked this all off - If I remember correctly, you were replying to another poster and mentioned something about both feeling like a genius for figuring out how to get a huge 1080x1080 'screen' in the cab without paying insulting sums of money for a square LCD, and also feeling like an idiot for "wasting" a bunch of the available screen area with it hidden inside the cabinet... and for some reason that stuck with me, and made me start thinking about how best to get any use at all out of the rest of the screen, which led to the 'what if it like folds or slides out of the cabinet somehow' train of thought, and if it does, what do I do with it then, and that's a very VERY abridged version of how we got to now. So really, we have this forum, and specifically you (and markc74 with Blip!, and Maximus with his MvC Revolution rebuild, who as far as I can tell was one of the first pioneers of the big vertical LCD club) to blame for this atrocity. ;D ...so thanks for that! :cheers: |
| Laythe:
--- Quote from: zeorangr on November 12, 2021, 06:37:46 pm --- --- End quote --- Looking at it from this angle... I've got an idea, which might already be in your plan - or might be too much work, or might not appeal to you. Free for you to use, modify, or discard as you like. I don't mean to be backseat driving or bossing you around on your project. You have a vertical wall under the control panel, which drops from the CP to the floor, running narrower within the width of the skirts around the main monitor. If the outside of those walls had a stack of 3 sliding leaves on top, maybe each mounted to more drawer rails, with the picture-right-edge of the top of the stack of leaves attached to the back cabinet, they'd form a collapsing telescoping cover to close off most all the visually open space while it's in pinball mode, but retract together when it's collapsed into arcade cabinet mode. I can mock it up in a picture if you don't follow my clumsy description. It looks cool open, so it hardly NEEDS it. But it might look slick. Just thinking! |
| zeorangr:
That's a neat thought Laythe. I had actually been toying with the idea of trying to eventually do ...well... something to add a 'cover' of some sort for at least part of the bottom section under the screen box, if for no other reason than to really give it a more authentic pinball silhouette when it's extended. I was thinking of maybe using some kind of attached weighted fabric 'skirt' (since it would more easily extend and contract with the cabinet movement) that would cover an area from the bottom of the screen box down to around knee height, leaving about 2' of mostly empty space underneath. Something like this (the black section - ignore the completely not to scale overlay - it's more just to help illustrate the target shape / profile): A 'sliding leaf' system of some sort might also work to the same effect though. I'll have to look and see how I might be able to get something like that to fit - it might be doable with smaller / lighter rails and thinner lumber. All of this is 3/4" plywood, so that's 2 1/4" plus roughly another 1 1/2" width for the rails surface mounted - not sure how the taper on a ~4" difference front to back would look off the top of my head, but I might be able to route out at least some space for the rails and inlay them a bit, or use thinner lumber and smaller / lighter rails. Hmm... that might work - in any case it's something I think I'll look at and maybe try to model with some scrap lumber while I'm waiting for paint to dry when I head back down to the shop this weekend. If you want to do a mockup, I'd be happy to take a look - I'd definitely be interested in getting a better picture of what you're envisioning, because reading over your idea again, now I can't get the '89 Batmobile out of my head for some reason- specifically, the shielding: (Credit: original image) Nifty idea, thanks! |
| Laythe:
Good thought on routing the rails down near flush. I was figuring that if the telescoping covers were just a cosmetic feature, they only need to be strong enough to withstand the occasional possible bump and to hold up paint - no need to make it full 3/4" ply. But either way, using thin plywood or sinking the rails, reduces the stack depth. In my head I was carrying the full height, from the ground up to as high as clears the monitor swing-through space, in the telescoping leaves to make the whole thing read like a solid pedestal - but you've got a good point on the silhouette of a pinball machine not hitting the ground there, and your hanging skirt approach fills the wedge of top space that leaves would have left awkwardly open. Looking at your overlay... yeah, I think I'm with you on intentionally leaving the bottom half of the space open to make it more pinball cabinet like. |
| zeorangr:
How about this Laythe: I've been turning this over in my head today, and I think there may be a way to combine the two ideas, and use drawer rails with maybe a piece of 1/4" ply combined with fabric skirting around the screen flex points if needed to get the same effect. You're absolutely right, this wouldn't be bearing any kind of load. So here's the idea - With the way the cab is built, I needed some kind of better structural support for the middle 16 or so inches, since that's where all the drawer rails for the pedestal and screen movement live. So I built in shelves on the sides, to essentially help brace the main supports by attaching them to to the sides of the cabinet, but also to store lightguns / controllers / guitars for clone hero / extra joysticks and spare parts / etc. I think this is one of the better shots to display the shelves: Anyway, the thought is that I could add a set of drawer rails and panels on the wall of the shelves, or even on the side of the cabinet and attach them to the screen drawer, or even directly to the pedestal so that they slide out when the pedestal and screen do. And for any cutouts that might be needed to accommodate the screen tilting, I could use a scaled-down black fabric skirt for, so that it would flex with the panel, but still hopefully be neither too obviously visible, nor visually detract from the overall profile. Something like this, maybe? If the panel rails are slightly below the main screen rails, that may even let me attach this directly to the pedestal without interfering at all with the screen movement. I'll have to see if this all actually could fit together in a feasible manner when I get back down there, but even if it requires some tweaking, I think this may work. |
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