What is the best way to handle restoring the inside of a cabinet.

sabrewulf69

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What is the best way to restore the inside of this cabinet? This is a Neo Geo MVS Samurai Shodown II edition cab that I'm restoring back to a standard MVS 4, (due to my inability to find a way to restore all of the Sham Sho II art). So the inside of the cab will need to be black, what is the correct way to do so, tear down the cab remove the white and install black vinyl, or just prime and paint the inside? Is it OK to paint over the vinyl? I'd like to make it look as good as I possibly can. I have a 30 gal air compressor and a nice LVLP paint gun.
 

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I'm gonna be that guy. These aren't that common, I'm sure someone will happily trade you a 4 slot cab for was toasted. Someone had turned the cab into a multicade.
 
I'm gonna be that guy. These aren't that common, I'm sure someone will happily trade you a 4 slot cab for it.
Wish I could have, someone had turned it into a multicade. Non of the Samurai Shodown II art, cpo or marquee remained
 
To partly answer your other questions about white to black on the inside... I don't own one of those cabinets so I'm not familiar with that particular vinyl, but it's usually pretty tough to remove vinyl. In some cases, it can be removed with the help of a heat gun and peeling it (which worked on my 720 degrees), but other times it's basically permanently fused to the particle board.

Painting it to another color can sometimes be successful especially in small areas, similar to yours. But it'll always be more prone to scratching and leaving white scratches. If you would do that, clean it well first and use a higher quality spray paint like Rustoleum, not Krylon fast dry stuff.

Wrapping the inside whether you removed the old vinyl or not seems like it'd take disassembly of the cabinet to do it right. In this case I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. If I were going with your original plan, I'd either leave it white or spray paint it black the best that I could.
 
To partly answer your other questions about white to black on the inside... I don't own one of those cabinets so I'm not familiar with that particular vinyl, but it's usually pretty tough to remove vinyl. In some cases, it can be removed with the help of a heat gun and peeling it (which worked on my 720 degrees), but other times it's basically permanently fused to the particle board.

Painting it to another color can sometimes be successful especially in small areas, similar to yours. But it'll always be more prone to scratching and leaving white scratches. If you would do that, clean it well first and use a higher quality spray paint like Rustoleum, not Krylon fast dry stuff.

Wrapping the inside whether you removed the old vinyl or not seems like it'd take disassembly of the cabinet to do it right. In this case I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze. If I were going with your original plan, I'd either leave it white or spray paint it black the best that I could.
You can replace the inner vinyl without disassembly. You just have to use the trick that the granite guys use when they're installing countertops. You basically take paper, larger and smaller pieces to follow the exact outline of the inside shroud area and then you tape them all together. Obviously leaving the template outline to be perfectly matched with the inner shroud outline. I did this on my ladybug restoration. It worked great. In fact, I'm gonna be doing it on my Shark Attack resto soon, as the original insides of that game were vinyl and not paint. It's a little bit daunting at first, but you kind of get the hang of it after you start.

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Either that, or yes, I've successfully painted vinyl many times. You need to use rustoleum 2X primer and paint in one, make sure you've got the surface clean, and make sure you use light coats. Also be very careful your passes are even and overlapping so you don't see any tiger striping.
 
You can replace the inner vinyl without disassembly. You just have to use the trick that the granite guys use when they're installing countertops. You basically take paper, larger and smaller pieces to follow the exact outline of the inside shroud area and then you tape them all together. Obviously leaving the template outline to be perfectly matched with the inner shroud outline. I did this on my ladybug restoration. It worked great. In fact, I'm gonna be doing it on my Shark Attack resto soon, as the original insides of that game were vinyl and not paint. It's a little bit daunting at first, but you kind of get the hang of it after you start.

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Either that, or yes, I've successfully painted vinyl many times. You need to use rustoleum 2X primer and paint in one, make sure you've got the surface clean, and make sure you use light coats. Also be very careful your passes are even and overlapping so you don't see any tiger striping.
Damn, I don't think I'd ever attempt that unless I found myself having no other option. You pulled it off nicely, good job. That takes some skill.
 
You can replace the inner vinyl without disassembly. You just have to use the trick that the granite guys use when they're installing countertops. You basically take paper, larger and smaller pieces to follow the exact outline of the inside shroud area and then you tape them all together. Obviously leaving the template outline to be perfectly matched with the inner shroud outline. I did this on my ladybug restoration. It worked great. In fact, I'm gonna be doing it on my Shark Attack resto soon, as the original insides of that game were vinyl and not paint. It's a little bit daunting at first, but you kind of get the hang of it after you start.

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Either that, or yes, I've successfully painted vinyl many times. You need to use rustoleum 2X primer and paint in one, make sure you've got the surface clean, and make sure you use light coats. Also be very careful your passes are even and overlapping so you don't see any tiger striping.

These are mad skills to pay the bills.

I'm just curious, in the one photo I see the very top and a section of black. I'm guessing this is where the vinyl ends and the paint begins?
 
What ReWrite said.

If you have a somewhat uncommon cab in decent condition, modifying it to turn it into something different will mean one less of the cab it started out as.

It may seem trivial, but look at the hobby from the perspective of 50 or 100 years from now. Will a future child of your child of your child appreciate that someone went through the trouble to preserve an original cab, versus hacking it into a copy of a different cab, that is no longer original? Which one will have more value to future collectors? Which types of cars, musical instruments, pieces of antique furniture, etc have the highest values today? It's alwaus original unmodified examples.

We are custodians of these machines, for the short time we have them. They will all last longer than us, if properly cared for. We should work to preserve anything that can be preserved, and not destroy things for which a finite number of original examples exist. Because once something original is hacked/converted/modified, etc, you can't go backwards.

As it was said above, if what you have is in good shape, find someone to trade you for the cabinet you want. And let someone else preserve the one you have.
 
These are mad skills to pay the bills.

I'm just curious, in the one photo I see the very top and a section of black. I'm guessing this is where the vinyl ends and the paint begins?
Are you talking about the top little piece that goes in front of the marquee? It's all vinyl. On (many of) the Universal cabinets they literally seamed the vinyl at strategic points on the inside edges of the cabinet. Above the marquee area, above the monitor area, above the control panel area, etc. makes it easy ( on those cabinets) to replace just about any piece of it.

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Are you talking about the top little piece that goes in front of the marquee? It's all vinyl. On (many of) the Universal cabinets they literally seamed the vinyl at strategic points on the inside edges of the cabinet. Above the marquee area, above the monitor area, above the control panel area, etc. makes it easy ( on those cabinets) to replace just about any piece of it.

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Yup, that was the area I was talking about. Very cool how they did that and can't believe you were able to replace it and make it look that nice.
 
Very nice, might be able to solve my Dragrace dilemma this way. The inside of that cabinet appears to be laminated in parts.
 
Very nice, might be able to solve my Dragrace dilemma this way. The inside of that cabinet appears to be laminated in parts.
There was a dude, Duane Hawley? Who was able to cut all those little laminate pieces for each game he had that used them. He had some weird template system that he set up. I'm sure it's in a thread somewhere.
 
I'm not sure WHO has that artwork, but it was publicly shared years ago. And I thought that one of the art folks in the community has offered it in the past.

I'd start with messaging this guy:


Because of this post:

It took me a while to ask, but the reddit user was kind enough to share what he had. They'll still need to have someone clean them up and make them fit a mvs though, but this is a good start. He also gave me his permission to share these and the rest of the files for different games with the community.
 

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