Did I mess up?

[dcsgguy]

So I had an old CAB that I was fixing up.  The CP was a metal one that had a bunch of holes I did not like.

What I did was get some metal tabs and glued them under the holes, then I filled them in with bondo.  let it dry and than sanded it down.  Now I have a nice clean palatte to work with.

Well I just now though of the problem.  When I get my new hardware, will I be able to mount them correctly since the metal tabs I used added a good couple of centimeters to some places underneath the CP.

Do I need to find a way to get those off?  If I do, will the bondo fill ins stay in place?

[waveryder]

Those fills wont stay in place. Any serious button bashing and they'll pop right out. When it comes to metal CP's you just gotta get hold of a blank one and start again. Went through a similar issue with my betty cab. My £0.02

[dcsgguy]

I'm not even sure how to get a hold of a blank metal CP for a tempest cab.

[CheffoJeffo]

I'll disagree with waveryder since there are a bunch of people (myself included) who do/have done metal CP repairs successfully.

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/wiki/Restoration

For most of these, they are filling in old holes without drilling new ones. In a case like that, I would probably patch the panel without filling, then drill new holes, then fill the old holes.

[waveryder]

Please post some pics of your bondo repaired panel. I would be very interested in the results. Personally i had no luck with filling metal panels. I would love to see how you did this without welding equiptment.

[dcsgguy]

I did a real jimmy rig on the job.  Basically I gorilla glued the metal tabs to the bottom sides of the holes, then filled in the holes from the top with bondo.

Sanded it all down and voila, a blank CP.  Except now I have those metal tabs on the bottom that I don't think I can get off.  Plus I don't know what will happen when I drill new holes through the bondo...

So where can I get a new metal CP?  Can I just take my existing one somewhere and they can recreate it?

[waveryder]

Thats what I did. I just took mine to a fabrication works and had a few laser cut one for me out of steel, wasnt expensive. I didnt have any luck patching the original this is probably because my button layout crossed heavily into the patches. I would wait to see CheffoJeffo's. If a patch is possible without weakening the panel it would save you a lot of time. My £0.02

[CheffoJeffo]

Sorry -- I'm not yanking the panel out of the cab (and it's not that interesting with the plates on the bottom and the overlay on top).

There are some links in the wiki that I referred to above that show the process those folks have used (which I copied).

FWIW, I would never think of removing the metal plates I used as backing (even if I could) ... is that the difference ? I can't see how, between an adhesive CPO and the backing plates, that the fill would pop out.

[dcsgguy]

Ya I did what one of those wiki's suggested about a year ago.  bad news for me is that I was going through a divorce and I wasn't thinking too straight.  I should have just left all the holes like they were and patched the ones I didn't use.

Instead I thought it would be better to patch everything then and just redrill new holes when I was ready.

So anyone from here near Pittsburgh that knows a fabrication shop I can get a new piece of sheet metal for this made?