I’ve finally started work on the All American Football cabinet. The vinyl is stripped off the cabinet and cosmetic repairs have begun. I’m not using Bondo on this cabinet as there wasn’t a need to rebuilt sections of the cabinet, simply filling and patching some holes. I’m using a product called Rock Hard Water Putty instead. It’s similar to normal wood putty but it comes in a powdered form that you mix with water. Once all of the cabinet repairs are finished, I’ll post a few pictures to update you on the progress. There’s nothing too exciting to show right now.

I also started work on the control panel overlay this weekend. If you recall, there was a big chunk missing from the lower right hand corner and an adhesive sticker that had been placed over a portion of the control panel at some point. Continue reading via the link below for a look at the process I use to recreate the control panel.

The first thing we need is a good scan of the control panel. I removed all of the joysticks and buttons from the panel, carefully labeling each on so I can put them back in the proper place. I then cleaned the top of the control panel to remove any dust and debris.

To scan the panel, I had to remove the top cover from my scanner. Using the edges of the control panel as guides, I scanned the entire panel in multiple passes, making sure to overlap each section slightly. There were a total of 9 separate images files which I then imported into Fireworks and “stitched” back together to get a complete scan of the panel. Here’s a picture of the scans after being “stitched” together:

The rest of the process is fairly simple. I created a new file in Illustrator with the exact measurements of the control panel, which is 26 1/8″ by 15 3/4″. The scan is also sized to those exact measurements. The scan is placed in the illustrator file as a base and then you simply hand trace the elements. Here is my progress so far:

The easy parts are done, now for the helmets and trying to match the fonts. The helmets should be fairly easy, as they are all duplicates except for color. Once I get one helmet done, it’s simply a matter of recoloring them, and moving them to the correct orientation. There’s probably about 3 hours of work into this so far, I would guess another 4 or 5 hours of work before it’s close to completion.