Build Log (Part 5)

It's been a couple of years since I did any work on the arcade cabinet.  During that time I have showed the half-finished product to friends, who all seemed to think it was a neat idea, but I knew I just wasn't going to feel settled until the whole thing was wrapped up.  Still, it was very difficult to find time to work on the project - what with a full time job and two kids and all.  The only thing I'd really managed to do during this time was use a little Bondo to fill in the worst of the wood gaps.

And then my wife took a job on nights and weekends, leaving me in charge of the kids for 20-30 hours a week with nothing to do.  How to fill up that time?  Of course... finish the arcade cabinet.  That ought to take at least a week or two, and then I can find a new project / play games on this after the kids are asleep at night.

So when I last left off I was preparing for the next step: paint.  We had painted our bathroom a soft blue color last year and still had some of the paint left, so I knew recycling that would be the way to go.  It was supposed to be just a roll-on job with brushes to fix any errors.  Step one is to sand.  I skipped Step 1.

Instead I went direct to Step 2, "prime cabinet".  This is a white latex primer also leftover from the Great Bathroom Painting.  It coated everything fairly well, except the very rough plywood faces that I didn't sand.  Which in retrospect look pretty goofy.

Next step: paint the cabinet in blue.  I needed to do two coats to get coverage, though things dried fast as it is over 100 degrees here in the summertime.  The picture above shows areas masked off with tape for the next step.

Final step in painting was to do the off-color.  I got a can of Quick Color spray paint (97 cents!) at Home Depot in gloss black and went to town.  The top and fake T-molding were done in one coat.  Actually, I'm really bad with spray paint and ended up getting considerable overspray on the blue, so I needed to go back again with the blue paint once this had dried and do some touch-ups.  The end result was not half-bad, though again with sanding I would have been much happier with the results.

Of course what comes after paint?  Art!

Here are the bits of art I put together for this project: the Official MAME Logo (tm) copied twice, and a pair of Control Reference cards that I mocked up in Inkscape.  I had these printed at Staples on glossy specialty paper (not cardstock) for a total cost of $2.00.  It's not much, but it really does help bring the cabinet together.  And finally people will stop hitting the Exit button when they want to insert a coin.

We're getting close to the end now...!