Meet Ms PacMan #10371

Shiiiiit! Looking good man! You're gonna be a professional painter when this cab is finished! I got one of those electric $100 HVLP sprayers from Harbor Freight. Saves me from having to use my under powered 6 gallon compressor. Loving this progress you're making! When you're done with yours, you're more than welcome to restore mine! :p
 
I had never wanted to read this thread because I'm usually like "meh, I don't have time for that", but damn it was interesting

You should sell those coils(the ones that are close to the original inductance)

I thought about it, but they are a royal pain. While the one I made for myself is sufficient for restoring my monitor, it isn't of a level of quality/refinement that I could sell. I might return to it as a later project though. I was focused on keeping it looking similar to the original, as well as functioning like the original. I think if I drop the look requirement and just focus on function, and the ability to use the original brackets, it might be a bit easier.
 
Shiiiiit! Looking good man! You're gonna be a professional painter when this cab is finished! I got one of those electric $100 HVLP sprayers from Harbor Freight. Saves me from having to use my under powered 6 gallon compressor. Loving this progress you're making! When you're done with yours, you're more than welcome to restore mine! :p

You couldn't pay me enough! :D While much of this process has been about learning, doing a proper restore is a lot of work. i can certainly see why folks, who do restores professionally, charge what they charge. It's also why I have "over documented" this process. Others can learn from my mistakes, as well as decide the level of effort they want to undertake.

After going through this process, I give much more consideration to the state of the cabinet vs the price. Do I want a decent looking game to play, or another six month project?
 
Got the pink layer done yesterday afternoon. Had to change out the exhaust fan filter first.

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The state of the filter above also shows why PPE is important when painting in a booth, with any sort of sprayed paint -- but especially spray guns.

All dressed up and ready for the paint booth. Or maybe the grocery store... And before somebody comments, all the PPE was purchased long ago, before corona virus was a thing. In fact, its time to change the filters on my respirator, but that will have to wait. Luckily they are still doing fine with respect to paint.

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It's pink!!!

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So, a couple notes on the colors. First, the auto white balance on my phone screws with the colors, probably due to the LED floods and panels that provide the light in my garage. At some point, I'll see if I can get a better color rendition. Second, the pink darkens significantly as it dries. It is not nearly as bubblegum pink as it looks above.

This is immediately after removing the stencil. Paint is still pretty wet.

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I did two coats of pink. I did all three sides with a first coat, then came back and did a second light coat. I didn't wait between coats, other than the time it took me to do the entire cabinet before coming back to the starting side for the second coat. In light coats, the paint seems well set by the time I made it back to that the second coat. The pink covered well and I didn't find any places where the yellow of blue showed through.

I removed the stencils as soon as I finished painting. Again, starting with the first side I painted, so the paint had maybe 15 minutes of set time. Even so, I got some pretty sharp edges on the paint layer and some places where I had very thin bits of paint standing up at the edge (hard to explain). I went over all the edges with a damp Q-tip and everything smoothed up nicely. Once the paint is set, it's actually pretty easy to work with. The damp Q-tip, with light pressure, would knock down sharp edges, but wouldn't really do much to the surface unless overly wet, or too much pressure. With a bit of practice, the Q-tip would just ride the pink edge, making it relatively easy to do.

I have to wait until at least tomorrow evening to do the black. I'm actually thinking that I'm going to cut the black stencils into sections, rather than try to apply the whole side at once and get everything to align. The black alignment is the most critical and I'm afraid, even with the alignment marks, that it will be impossible to get the sides to align well as a single sheet.
 

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Applying the black stencils took way way longer than expected, just like so much else in this project. I did opt to cut out the various pieces of the stencils.

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The various pieces were applied individually to get the registrations as close as possible.

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The smaller sections helped minimize the amount of repositioning necessary after application.

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The large border pieces we a pain to put on, and in many cases needed a little stretching and flexing. Invariably this would result in waves in the material. Very little ones could be worked out, though they had a tendency to come back. I stressed about this for a bit and then figured out they were easy to fix.

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An exacto knife inserted in the middle of the wave, putting a slice in it, allows it to lay right down without issue. Its pretty straight forward, though you want to take the slice a bit further back than you might think, if possible.

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After slicing and pressing, I applied cellophane tape over the seam. This helped keep it from lifting up and helps to keep paint out.

I probably spent 10 hours on the black stencils and still didn't quiet get the registration right everywhere.
 

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This morning, I masked off the little bits of the cabinet not covered by the black stencils.

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You can see where the various seams between the various outer sections were. You can also see that I figured out that bubbles and creases in the film, anywhere other than the edges of stencil... they don't really matter. Don't stress over them. Get the edge registration right and don't stress the rest.
 

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And then came the black....

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I mentioned in an earlier post that the camera was misrepresenting the colors a bit due to the white balance. I took a picture with the white balance adjusted to be more representative of the actual blue colors though it's still not perfect as then the pink is a bit wrong.

Left is uncorrected. Right is corrected.

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I'll have a good bit of touch up to do, unfortunately. With the yellow and pink, removing the stencil just about as soon as I could was the right thing to do. It left a decent edge that wasn't super pronounced. I learned that doing the same for the black was the wrong thing to do. Unfortunately, the black doesn't really adhere well until it starts to set up. As a result, the first sections I pulled also pulled some of the black paint. :(

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Those are two of the worst and will definitely get fixed. Other areas just leave sort of a rough edge, like you would get when if you enlarged an hand inked drawing. I actually like the effect in areas, even though it's not entirely true to the original cabinet artwork. Not sure if I will try and fix those areas, both because I like it and because its not nearly as bad and will be more likely to cause more harm than good.

Of course I also found all the places I screwed up the registration. These were mainly on the right side of the cabinet, which not coincidentally is the first side it did.

It looks great in pictures. Less polished in person. I both pleased and annoyed with how it turned out. Considering that large parts of this project have been learning exercises for things I haven't done before, at least at this scale, I'm pleased that things worked as well as they did. My perfectionist nature makes me disappointed with the outcome as I know I could do better now. I'll take some more pictures of the oopses for a later post.
 

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With painting done, I got to take down the pain booth. To be fair, I still have some painting to do, but nothing that requires the booth. This means I can actually start putting things back together.

First up was a new pair of cabinet handles.

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Next up was the T molding. This was high on the list to help protect the cabinet.

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I got luck with the T molding. It went in smoothly and stayed in place. A rubber mallet was all it took.

I couldn't help myself and went and got the marquee and control panel and put them in place.

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You'll note the color difference between the control panel and the cabinet. I actually used the control panel to color match the blue. In certain lighting, they match exactly. Unfortunately the CPO and cabinet change colors differently under different lighting. Not much to be done about it at this point, just something to note.
 

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I thought I'd do a "before and after"... Note, if you click on the pictures, you get a bigger version.







 

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When I set the control panel in place, I realized how nasty the brackets were -- they had just been sitting in a bin since I took everything apart and I had forgotten the nastiness. Some time with a wire wheel made things much better. I'll probably spray paint them later to protect the surface. They don't have to look great, just not rust.

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Today, a package arrived.

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What's in it? A pair of back doors for Midway cabinets. One for Ms Pac, and one for my Galaga cabinet.

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Perfect fit!

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As I mentioned earlier, I do still have some painting to do, and the back door is a big part of it. The other major piece is the metal angle piece that protects the rear bottom of the cabinet.

On top of the arrival of the door, today was a very big day for another reason. For the first time in 15 months, there isn't an arcade cabinet in the garage.

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While it's just an empty cabinet upstairs, I should be able to power it up and play a game tomorrow.
 

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With the cabinet moved upstairs, I could really start putting it back together. Since the floor is carpeted, laying it over to put the wheels back on way much less trouble. Need to order levelers...

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Original speaker goes back in. It's a bit crusty looking, but sounds fine. Original speaker grill that I had powder coated.

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Dropped the power supply board into the bottom of the cabinet.

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With that, I was able to wire up the switches and plug in the marquee light. First signs of life. The blown out yellow is just the exposure on my phone. This is the original marquee, and other than a few light scratches on the plexi, it looks great.

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Here's a better marquee shot.

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Next up came the coin door. For the time being, I just set it in place. It was also powder coated and the shiny bits were replated, other than the midway plate, which is a replica. There is more on the coin door, earlier in the thread.

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Huge step! The monitor gets mounted. Now, there is actually a problem visible in this picture, but only very sharp eyed folks would catch it. I didn't catch it till later.

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Power to the marque and coin door lights.

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At this point, I couldn't help myself and I grabbed the board and the rest of the wiring harnesses and temporarily connected everything -- the board was just leaning on the inside of the cabinet.

 

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I mentioned in the prior post of the monitor install that there was a problem. I went to try and mount the monitor surround and found nothing to attach it to. Turns out when I had put the monitor back together after its bath, I had mounted the rails, that the surround screws onto, upside down. Luckily, you can loosen the bolts that connect the tube to the frame and flip the rails over, without removing the monitor from the cabinet. Didn't take any pictures though. After correcting that little mistake, I got the monitor surround and glass installed.

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I also bolted the control panel in place, so it wouldn't try an flop around while I was working on other stuff. Board and wiring harness were mounted and tidied.

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With that, the game is in a fully playable state, and the project will probably go on the back burner for a bit while I attend to some other things -- cleaning up the garage shop, as well as my electronics shop, a couple of non-arcade repair projects, maintenance on the 3d printer, and of course, playing some video games and pinball.

A quick power up vid with all the "clothes" on.


Project isn't done though. I need to paint the back door, as well as do some paint touch up work. Need to order cam locks and leg levelers too.
 

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Hi! Amazing job! Can you give advice? I have a MsPacman machine that worked for many years, moved it from NC to NY and two houses later and appears the bulb cracked. Cabinet is blue wood, MsPacman sign, Galaga controller. Had a video repairman come look at it and he said to junk it. Do you think I should try to fix it or sadly part with it. I've had it since 1994. Thanks for the info!
 

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