Project : Arcade - Cabinet On Hold

I was excited at starting to work on my cabinet. But the honeymoon was a short duration sadly.

Let's start from the start.

I got the cabinet yesterday, and I was happy with the looks of it... at first. Looking closer, it was not as pretty, but many things could be fixable.


First thing, the marquee and monitor area. The plexi is in good shape, no problem there. No really noticeable scratches. The lights are not hooked to any kind of power, but that's not a big deal at this point.


There's some places to clean, but I already planned on painting it later. Te back cover was taken off to see inside. The power blok was severed, so it's useless now at any rate.

Otherwise, the control panel was okay, but no microswitches left, so not workable. At any rate, I'm changing it to a 4 player planel.

The coin door looks good overall, but the coin mech is not working. It has the leds and the switch, but none of the coin-analysing stuff. So there's no coin return, and also the coin only randomly hits the switch. This can be fixed with a bit of cardboard to force the coin to hit the switch later.

So I noticed that the top seems to be mounted on the sides. The first thing I tried was to unscrew it from the inside. There's some kind of wooden inserts as well, so you'd only need to pry it apart a little for them to slide out and take the top off.

Well, normally speaking at least, because it wasn't moving at all, not a millimeter. So I looked at other parts. There's a slanted panel inside that is bolted to the control panel. it seems it had the motherboard on it too. It's made so you can simply slide it out by pulling from the front. Except that once again, it wasn't budging. The wood around the control panel seems to have taken some humidity, so it bulged out, and is slightly pushing the panel inside to the side, so I'm not able to pull out more than 6 inches or so. So I'm leaving that aside, may need to cut it out later.

So I keep looking for a way to pry off the top part. There's a small panel near the back, it's screwed in place with a L-Elbow. I take the screws off, and guess what. IT'S NOT MOVING. And there's no visible screws on the top unit, and no screws on the panel with the speakers. That's when I realized that they must have hot glued (or some other glue) the whole thing together in one piece. Wow, what incredible crap.

So right now, it's on hold until I can figure out a way to get inside, one way or another. Right now there's absolutely no way I can get inside of it, so none of the work can be done. Even if I painted the exterior it would be useless.

Well, it's on hold for the main part of it at least. I'll be working on the control panel while I find some solution. I'm seriously thinking scrapping that cabinet, taking the parts I can still use, and building one from ground up, like my very first idea was. Thought it would be a shortcut to get a ready-made cabinet, but it doesn't work that way.