Vectorbeam Space War

tester007

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Well, after the Wild Western rstore I really have not posted up anything.. I have done a Missile Command, a Pac Man, a Tron.. Part of the issue I think with myself is I decide quickly to start on one and just go for it without taking any of the before pics so think as I am half way into it that there isn't much point of taking any.. or there is a lul in the resto and I just forget.. So I decided this time I would not make the same mistake, and took some of the before pics. This resto will be quicte a bit of wood work so I need to order in vinyls and things that may slow this down a bit. But I also figured if I started a thread from the start, then it would motivate me to keep moving on it.

So I got this machine as part of a group buy. It was in very rough shape, and in spite of the 'ol 'all games were working when I put them into storage' sales pitch, had a broken crt neck, and a dead sound board. The power supply also had a blown bridge recifier. I had a new crt that I swapped in, fixed the power supply and got the game functioning. The cab itself though is a basket case. Instead of cutting it all back on the bottom and bondoing it I decided just to do new sides. The vinyl used on the game (white) actually has a texture almost identical to melamine.. fine with me as that makes life a lot easier.

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Bottom was very damaged from water.

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Most of the other parts seem ok on it. The marquee will probably need to be replaced though as will not be up to quality as the rest of cab.

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I will re-use a lot of the internal wood not just for fitament, but to keep as much original. It will be sanded down and re-painted.

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Artwork has been repro'd so no problems here..

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In trying to figure out how to approach this, I just removed one of the sides. I will keep the rest together and transfer it one piece at a time. One side allows me to cut the 2 sides I need anyways.

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I traced the pieces of wood on the sides to get measurements for placing on the new sides. Also labelled each piece as some are pretty similar in length.
 
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Top of side removed. I took this side because it had unique things like the game pcb frame, but also because it had the best bottom. So much was eaten away on the other side that I would have been guessing on the proper distance to bottom edge.

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Traced out the original onto the sheet of melamine.

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I tried first to cut the straight edges using a circular saw. Top edge gets chipped, while bottom edge is perfect.. The opposite of a table saw. So I would not do the usual half cut depth on one side, then flip over and cut through the other side for a perfect edge system that you can do with a table saw. Some of the edges are straight, but angled as well so a table saw would have been difficult cutting say the top edge of the cab. A full sheet is also unwieldly so I would have had issues either way. I bought a 3 blade router bit for my plunge router and used a straight edge to test its cut. The sample diagram on the box for the bit only shows melamine on one side of the wood, but it cut very cleanly on both the top and bottom sides. I was very happy with that and it also saved me a bunch of work. Above you can see the circular saw cut at top, then the router cut on the bottom portion.

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So I laid the new sheet that I had trimmed down with a circular saw to within an inch or two of the actual cut line that I had traced out earlier, over top of the old original side. Using the old side as a guide, I routered out the entire edge.

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Worked out very well. Routered in the t-moulding channel and set both sides aside for the vinyl. The insides of this machine had a black textured vinyl.


Next to come: Vinyl from Happ ordered. Have 'Bison Black', and 'Black Hide' coming. I got samples from them but they only had the pica and bison black swatches to send. The Bison black is close.. very close.. but a little bit too leathery. The vinly on this and other games like Atari's had a leather tecture, but very small pattern. I will see which is better.
 
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Thanks.. hope this will kepe me motivated ;)
If anyone reading this has any parts like the upper metal marquee, or the lower plastic piece, or the lighting fixture below control panel please drop me a line.


I will be ordering the vinyl today so there will probably be a lull until I get that in as I cannot even put the small wood pieces back on until one side of each piece is fully vinyld. I'm thinking I might just go with the Morocco vinyl from QA instead of spending twice as much on the 2 choices from Happ. I know the Bison Black is close, but not perfect, and have no idea what the Hide is like (they didn't have a swatch to send me) so don't want to take a chance on wasting a bunch when I know Morocco should be exact or pretty close to it.
I also have a swatch from Twisted Quarter coming in. When I get all the types in I will try and get some good pics to compare all of them. Everyone keeps asking, but it doesn't seem there is ever a really good comparison of the stuff you can get to the original.
 
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How do you get a side panel off?

I'm new at this and have started on a Tempest cabinet. I've stripped the side art off of both sides and have screwed broken corners back together and have finished Bondo-ing one side to "perfection". I'm about to start the other side, but I am noticing that the particle board is still very brittle on the edges. I'd love this thing not to fall apart when I'm done. It seems more brittle than newer store bought particle board. I'd love to just trace/router a new sides like you have before I put new side art on... I'd be willing to scrap the time that I've put in and replace the sides w/ new wood. Do you have any suggestions on getting the sides off?

Thanks!
 
Well I have emailed, and called and called quarterarcade for the last week with no answer either way, so I will be going with the Bison through Happ.

To get the sides off, use a very flat pry bar. I have one that is about 2" wide and flat. You can tap it in between the wood joints. Look at where the staples are and try and go inbetween. If you just start hammering on the thing you risk damaging some of the parts you might want to keep. You can also use a wood block against an edge and hammer against that to protect the wood you are moving. Hit with sharp hard hits once, see what it did.. hit again, see what it did..etc.. Also keep in mind if you are going this route that you probably won't use the sides again anyways so you can hammer against them. I pryed it all so that the strip wood supports came off with the sides, and off the wood shelving inside. You can see from the pics how it came apart. When I had a good portion of it coming off, I laid the cab down on its side with the side I was taking off up, and just lifted up to pull it all off to save the parts I was keeping from pry bar damage.. It came off pretty easily with minor damage to anything else. I am just re-using mainly the inside stuff but some is showing like the speaker shlef so keep an eye on those things when you do this.. so that you are not tearing a staple out the wrong way and ripping a chunk off the face. Particle board comes apart pretty easy around staples.
 
OK.. some progress.
Ordered a sample of the vinyl from Twisted Quarter. In the meantime Anthony got back to me from QA so I ordered some Moroccco vinyl from him. Time to get moving on it...

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Laid one of the sides down. The vinyl comes in I believe it was 50" wide rolls. So I made the choice to cut the roll in half, and therefore only need to spend half the $$ for it as the stuff isn't cheap. The sacrifice I would need to make would be that I would have a strip along the back edge of the inside of the cabinet that was 3-4" without vinyl. Of course if this was on the outside I would eat the extra cost, but because this really will not be seen I went this way.

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To start out, sprayed the perimeter of the inside edge of the side sheet black, with a thicker strip done along the back edge.

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Laid the vinyl down.. went on easily. I have to say that this is an 'exact', or close as it will come, to the original vinyl Atari used as well as Rock-ola/Cinematronics for their textured vinyl. No other vinyl sample I had came close. I will post some of that later, or in a dedicated thread. One thing to watch with this stuff is it has an edge on it that has no adhesive of a few mm's. Probably not an issue if you run over and edge and trim it off, but if you do what I did, might want to take that strip off.
Only other thing I noticed is the pattern repeats quite often. When it is laid down on a large area, you can see it like tiles.. have a pic somewhere I have to dig up.. SO in areas like around the monitor..etc.. I doubt anyone would ever notice, but doing the entire side of a cab like DL, or an Exidy cab might be able to notice.

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Shows the strip without vinyl.. I think it's absolutely fine and happy with doing it that way. Started to lay down some of the internal pieces.

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Speaker panel out. Had to shave down an edge a bit, and use wood filler to build back up. I used some of the extra vinyl I had to re-cover this piece. I wanted to re-use as many of these pieces as possible so it was more of a restore, than a complete rebuild, and so all the metal pieces would fit properly in keeping the width exactly the same as original. Also, some of the pieces had some bevels and routing that I did not want to try and duplicate.

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Some pieces going onto the other side of the cabinet. On this large area you can see a bit of what I mention about the texture repetition looking a bit tiled. But it's really not a huge deal as the pattern is so close to original that it's nice to be able to find something this close reguardless.

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New bottom piece. THe original was rotted out.

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Internal pieces together as well as most of the cab, so I could start to install some of the parts. Gameboard works fine, William Boucher fixed up the sound board as I had given up on trying to figure out what was wrong with it after replacing 80% of it. Power rebuilt, monitor board rebuilt and all cleaned up. This was one of the dirtiest machines I have ever had.
 
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Pic from the back again. Malamine looks great, but I cannot stand how fragile the edges are and susceptable to chipping. So I soaked all edges with wood hardener. New deck for monitor, as well as new back pieces.
Also on this is a piece of sideart from Rich. He shipped 2 of the same sides so I could only do one. Other side just shipped yesterday.

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Today got to work on some of the metal. Took apart control panel and cleaned it up as best as I could. Would like to try the oxy trick on the buttons, so might be doing that. Panel I stripped down due to a couple areas that were pitted slightly with rust. I am always amazed how far rust travels under paint. Ended up having to strip the entire deck surface. Treated the rust with acid, washed it and put some bondo on the pitted areas.

to be continued...
 
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Funny.. had the Happ vinyl sitting on my desk in the way for a couple months while waiting on this other stuff.. and now cannot find it.. Have to check garage as I may have been comparing it to the cab at some point.
Here are the other contenders though. The top strip is from Twisted Quarter. The grain is very fine, and I do not consider it a suitable replacement for leather-type vinyl.
The lower left one is Morocco from Arcade SHop. THe smaller one to the right is from a roll I found in a tube with my artwork.. ridiculous I have stuff I didn't even remember I had.. trying to order some for a couple months and had it all along.. I cannot recall 100% where I got this stuff from, but I seem to recall I got it from Rich. Either way I do not believe TIG sells this type of vinyl anymore. It has a heavier grain as you can see than the AS stuff. I will try and find the Happ vinyl, but I believe the only leather-style one they sent, Bison Black, had an even larger texture pattern than the TIG stuff. I'll post pics of them all together when I find it, and try and get some original Atari stuff off of an XO football to compare..

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Close up.
 
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Control panel sanded down w/bondo sanded.. look'n smooth. I wanted to keep the powdercoated look as much as I could so left the top areas un-sanded.. it was in good shape anyways.

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Primed it up.. All the pock-marks from the old rust gone..

Painted it black and had and amazing finish on it.. but a small piece of poplar tree fluff somehow found it's way in and landed on the center.. tried to pinch a piece of the fluff and touched the paint.. AAARGRRGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! why the h@ll didn't I just leave it and deal with it after it dried...
So when dried, sanded down the area where I touched the paint. I knew this was gonna suck since the finish looked a lot like powdercoated paint. I have found a type of paint that gives this look if you spray about 6 inches from metal. So the sanded area would be flatter than the other stuff but I decided to try. I re-sprayed the panel and the area I sanded now started to crackle.. Fer the love of....@$$##*!

So lesson learned, then forgotten, then re-learned... when you sand down paint, wait a day for the lower exposed area to dry before re-spraying!!! In fact, I had a Tron metal strip that holds down the plastic insert over the monitor that I painted at least 2 years ago. I was going to finally install it back on the Tron, but noticed an odd area where the paint had bunched together like the metal was not cleaned properly before painting.. so I sanded that down to flat, and re-sprayed the strip when I did this panel re-spraying.. even after all that time, the paint in the sanded areas crackled as well... so no matter how old the paint is, let it dry a day before re-spraying after sanding!! (unless factory paint..etc..)

Had to again sand it down so sanded the entire face again to get rid of the powdercoated bump look as it was getting too much in all the un-sanded areas on the flat surface of the CP. Waited a couple days, then re-sprayed.. looks good.. finally.

Took out all the buttons to do the oxy/peroxide whitening as they were quite yellowed... as well as the 2 grey coin return plastic pieces. I took before pictures, will post. I only had 3% peroxide so used a UV light I use for eprom erasing.. it foamed and foamed but after a few hours didn't seem to be progressing.. so put it outside in the sun.. I don't know what the online threads talk about.. the sun seemed to work FAR better. After an afternoon, I could tell a difference.. next morning poured some fresh peroxide in and could notice even more a few hours later. I want to do one more treatment with a completely fresh batch to get them snow-white... then will take 'after' pics. Need to go to the store to get more peroxide..
 
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Onwards. Ordered some tinted glass to use as I think it will look better than the clear plexi originally on. It will be in in a week or so.

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Painted up the bolts and the speaker grille. Drilled out the aluminum rivets that hold the speaker to the grill. I love the way bolts come out when painting them.

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took apart the control panel and removed the buttons.. very yellowed. Decided to try the hydrogen peroxid/oxy mixture people are using on the web.

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Results speak for themselves! I found daylight worked easiest and the best compared to a UV light.

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coming along nicely!

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The marquee on the left side has some odd sticky gunk all over it, and a scrape near the center. When I tried to even wipe the gunk with a bare cloth, the white paint started to smear.. Whatever they used to screen these has not held up well at all. So basically it would be impossible to get the gunk off without destroying the white. So I decided to try and make my own stencil.

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I took the vinyl mask from the sideart and covered the marquee. It is sticky so adhered very well, and you could see through it.

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traced out the artwork. Next step would be to take the paper off, stick it to something else like a piece of arborite, or just to another sheet of paper (although you would lose the sticky sode then), and cut out the letters to make the stencil. At this point I decided to ask Rich if he would cut a stencil from me in vinyl.. others could then use it, and would proably be better than this attempt, even though I am sure it would work. So I scanned the marquee and emailed it off to him. We will see what he thinks.
 
After seeing the numerous DK, Pac, ect restos, its nice seeing this classic get love. Very nice work man. Inspiring
 
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