Arcade Collecting > Restorations & repair
Dragon's Lair Restoration
polaris:
--- Quote from: More Cowbell on January 21, 2009, 10:17:20 am ---I received the marquee and cpo from Quarterarcade yesterday. I have to say I'm not entirely impressed at first sight. They both look very grainy. I'm hoping they will look fine once installed. Now I need to focus my attention on recreating the marquee plexi. It has that bowtie shape and is bent in two places so it's not as easy as just cutting to fit. I plan on cutting it to shape, then heating it with a heat gun briefly and hoping for the best. Fortunately, the marquee goes on the outside of the plexi so any imperfections will be covered. I'll take some pics of the marquee and cpo and the process of creating the plexi bends.
--- End quote ---
don't know if you saw it but someone posted a vid of them bending plexi with a heat gun in project announcements a few months back , ill try and find the link
EDIT here you go
More Cowbell:
Awesome link, polaris! That's exactly what I had planned on doing and I'm glad to see it will work. My bends are not near 90 degrees and the plexi is also only about 6 inches wide where it will be bent so it should be super easy. Famous last words.
erlsjj:
Nice work so far! Another one of my favorite games. Good luck with the restore.
More Cowbell:
Thanks, erlsjj. I made some good progress this weekend. Finally some rewarding progress that gets it closer to Dragon's Lair as opposed to last week which just got it to a blank grey cabinet. My wife finally lost patience with having it in the living room so I did one last sanding in the garage and moved it to the basement. Then I went about starting on installing the cpo. I sanded the control panel as best I could to remove all of the old adhesive. You can see that there is still some screen print left over from the original control panel. I install my cpo’s by dry fitting it with the buttons in, adjusting, and then cutting some of the backing off. I stick down that area, remove the buttons, then remove the rest of the backing and stick down the rest. Great plan, huh? Yeah, usually it works great. Unfortunately, the control panel is slightly tweaked which I hadn’t noticed so the whole thing ended up a little bit off. No one would ever notice it, but I know and it bugs me. Hopefully I can erase it from my memory with time. Then I started painting. The picture below is after two coats of semi-gloss paint from Home Depot. The stuff covers really well and goes a long way. I use a foam roller and the finishes usually come out great. I put another two coats on just for grins since I had paint in the pan, you’ll see the results of that in the next post.
More Cowbell:
Next it was time to get the marquee plexi cut and bent. I dreaded this and looked forward to it at the same time as it was something new that I hadn’t tried before. I was confused as to how to cut the initial piece. Should I just cut it to match the marquee overlay? Would things change as it was bent? I ended up cutting it slightly larger and figured I would cut it down to size. The cutting was from hell as I tried to use a jigsaw figuring that the edges would be hidden under the marquee brackets and I’ve cut plexi plenty of times with a table saw. Every once in a while the saw would catch and just tear a piece of plexi or throw a big crack in it. I had to move very slowly and keep it supported as well as possible. I finally got my oversized, unbent marquee. I dry fit it in place and marked where it would need to be bent. I secured it to a piece of wood with the marks on the edge and started heating with a heat gun. Only a few minutes to get it hot enough to bend. Tried it out, bent more, repeat. The bending worked great with no bubbling or even hints of clouding. I cut it to fit mostly with a miter saw moving slowly with that as well. Once again, I dry fit the marquee overlay to get it centered and straight, clamping it in place. I took one end of the clamps off and cut off the backing, stuck it down, and repeated with the rest. Trimmed off the excess and it was complete. I have the lower bracket but not one for the top so I decided to try to make one myself. I used a piece of aluminum L channel that I had lying around and cut a notch out of it with my dremel where it needed to bend. Cut it to size and it looks great in place. I spray painted it black last night so it’s still drying. It’s finally starting to look like a Dragon’s Lair. Next up, monitor installation and control panel wiring.
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