my first project - trying to convert a badly damaged Golden Axe conversion

[tetujin]

greetings!

so this (in progress) project involves myself and a few guys at work, and we're all trying to do this for the first time.  together, we have the requisite woodworking/hardware/software skills to build this thing, but the thing we don't have is experience with arcade cabinets.  we're keeping a blog here, replete with photos and other inanity.

the wall we're hitting our heads up against right now is the cabinet itself.  it's complete and sturdy, but the MDF side panels are badly bloated due to moisture, and we can't tell if there's any way to salvage it.  all along the sides, the MDF has expanded at least a 1/4" inch past it's original thickness.  we're afraid that sanding it would just cause it to fall apart, and we're unsure if it's possible to recompress it.  right now we're thinking the best thing to do would be to either just look for another emplty cabinet or build one from scratch, essentially throwing away the one we have now.  if anyone here wants to have a gander at the pics and make any kind of evaluation, we'd appreciate it, us being n00bs and all.  also, i know none of the pics are very close-up, but i can get better ones very quickly if it would help (the cabinet's out here at our loading dock at work)

anyway, hello to all of you, and it's good to be part of this community!

[IG-88]

Well, if you are going too start from scratch you might as well try sanding it down. Remove enough to get below the original thickness and then try filling it with Durham's Rock Hard Water Putty. The stuff is a piece of cake to work with and is dirt cheap. I've used it on several projects and it works great. You can sand and shape it to pretty much whatever you want. However, I've never tackled one with that much water damage. I think it could be rebuilt without to much fuss but being a conversion is it actually worth it?

Wonder what it was to begin with?

[tetujin]

yeah, right now the majority opinion is "it ain't worth it".

as for what it was, we took down all the details of the wells-gardner monitor that was living inside of it, and it's an odd model from 1982.  a friend of mine did a little googling and found some indications that that particular model was often commonly found in Centipede cabinets.  however, the cabinet and the monitor have 'Taito' stamped all over them, so i don't think it could actually have been.  so yeah, who knows?  something between 82 and 83 maybe?  apline ski?  i can't say.

[Raven..]

I love those little Taito mini cabs.  It could have been anything from Elevator Action to Zoo Keeper.  Really depends on the original color of the cab.

[tetujin]

we had to remove the carriage bolts that held the back door in place in order to get the monitor out, and there was some very vivid green paint underneath all the black paint.  could have been centipede, but i have no real idea.  it would be nice to find out, though.

anyway.

there's an auction up in anaheim this coming sunday, we're going to get a couple guys to go and  see if we can't find something worthy for fairly cheap, and save us the trouble of rebuilding from scratch.

[Raven..]

we had to remove the carriage bolts that held the back door in place in order to get the monitor out, and there was some very vivid green paint underneath all the black paint.  could have been centipede, but i have no real idea.  it would be nice to find out, though.

Jungle King!

[tetujin]

well, we gave up.  a friend of mine and i went to an auction in anaheim this past sunday and got a working version of Dynamite Cop (pics and documentation at my blog).  we've got a bunch of people at my workplace interested now, and it's helping move things along.  tomorrow we're going to clean it out and spiff it a little, then the next thing to do is sand it and prime the sides for fresh coats of paint.

for the curious, we're pretty sure it used to be WWF WrestleFest.

a question for the community:  what's the best way to remove T-molding?  the stuff that's in there now is stuck pretty tightly and i'm afraid of damaging the edges in trying to remove it, and i do /not/ want to ruin the sides of the cabinet.  any advice is appreciated!  thanks for looking...

[theCoder]

How bad is it?  My first project was a conversion.  The only problem with the molding was some pretty serious cigarette burns in the corners at the CP.  I just covered it up with larger CP that covered up the mess.  That's my only experience with old t-molding.   I'm sure someone on this forum can help you out. 

[tetujin]

the molding is actually pretty okay, but i think the routing wasn't done deeply enough and it kinda sticks up in the middle.  so i could probably leave it, but if i can replace it i'd like to.

[tetujin]

well.  we're close to done with the Dynamite Cop conversion.  we cleaned out the cabinet, built up a nice athlon 1.2GHz with half a gig, bought an ipac and an arcadeVGA card, and drilled more buttons (buttons 4-6 and coin for both p1 and p2).  it's in good shape now, and i'm replacing the old joysticks today with Happ Ultimate sticks.  the buttons are all new as well (except for one).  i even put in a cambridge soundworks subwoofer (400W!) to add a little kick to the gameplay.  i have a custom marquee at about 70% complete, so no pics of that yet.

yet to do:  i don't like whoever re-drilled the control panel to convert it from WWF Wrestlefest, because the buttons are spaced too far from each other left-to-right, but we're stuck with it until i get the new panel together.  that, and the player's spaces aren't really centered... player 1 has much more room than p2.  but again, that's something to fix.

also yet to do:  add a spinner, redesign the control panel for 4 players (this includes getting a wider piece of whatever so there's enough room), and get a new bezel (looks pretty ugly with the monitor frame showing).  oh, and clean the dang plexiglass.

anyway, it's here in my office at work.  it's a lot more popular than i thought it would be... there's usually two or three guys in here before work, during lunch, and after work, playing a lot of street fighter, metal slug, galaga, puzzle bobble, gauntlet, and dragon's lair.

pics are here:  http://rhythmmame.homelinux.org/photos/tags/myoffice
and the progress blog is here (same site): http://rhythmmame.homelinux.org