As promised, I finally have a few pictures to show the progress and paint job on the All American Football cabinet. As I said from the beginning of this project, this cabinet was going to serve as a test to try some new techniques. Why this cabinet? Essentially because it was cheap and doesn’t have much resale value. If I ruin it in the process, I’m not out much.
The biggest difference between this cabinet and the others I have done so far is the painting technique. The Dig Dug cabinet was sprayed with a HVLP sprayer, both primer and final coats. I decided to try some fine, white foam rollers on this cabinet and used flat black latex paint.
After stripping the vinyl off the entire cabinet, I sanded it down using my palm sander and 120 grit sand paper. I repaired a few gouges on the cabinet with wood putty prior to sanding. I then rolled two coats of latex primer on the entire cabinet, sanding between each coat with 220 grit sand paper. I then applied three coats of the flat black latex paint, again sanding between each coat with 220 grit sand paper.
I’m going to take a different approach with the pictures here and show both a before and after shot to give you an idea of the difference in the cabinet’s appearance now:
You might notice some “swirl” marks in a few of the pictures. Those are not in the paint, I wiped the cabinet down with some dusting polish prior to taking the pictures and didn’t allow it time to fully dry. The other thing you might notice is the base of the cabinet under the coin door missing. Look closely at the before and after photos of the cabinet front and you should be able to spot it. The base was actually cracked and pulling loose from the cabinet, so I cut it off. I’m going to recreate the missing piece, reattach it to the cabinet and fill the gap between the two base pieces with some wood putty. In order to hide the putty, I’ll probably end up painting the underside of the base black.
Finally, I recapped the monitor. The monitor had some fold over on the left hand side which can usually be cured by a cap kit. Forunately, the new capacitors fixed the problem and after a bit of adjustment, the image looks pretty good. I still think the colors need to be tweaked a little bit, which I’ll have to do once I can get into diagnostics mode. Keep in mind, it’s difficult to get good pictures of an arcade monitor with a camera (all of the images in this post have also been added to the photo gallery):
So what’s left for this cabinet? Obviously, the base repairs mentioned above. The marquee retainers need to be sanded and repainted as does the front, metal portion of the control panel. I’ll be applying all new t-molding and the new control panel overlay once it arrives. Stay tuned for further updates.
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