This biggest challenge in the conversion of the All American Football to Golden Tee has been the monitor orientation. All American Football made use of a vertically mounted monitor while Golden Tee requires a horizontally mounted monitor. My initial thought was to simply rotate the entire monitor, including the frame, in the cabinet to achieve a horizontal orientation. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out so well as the metal frame stuck out the back of the cabinet. On to plan 2, which is going to be difficult to explain.
Here’s a shot of the monitor in vertical orientation, as required by All American Football:
We’ll get a little monitor nomenclature out of the way to avoid confusion. The monitor is self explanatory, the frame is the metal part holding the monitor in place and the chassis is the PCB sitting under the monitor. What I needed to do was keep the frame and chassis in their present orientation inside the cabinet and modify them so the monitor could be rotated 90 degrees counter clockwise.
If you look closely at the picture above, you can see two rails on the outside of the frame (the bolt holes are just barely visible) that extend vertically the entire length of the frame. Here’s a shot of the frame side removed, with a better picture of that rail:
In the picture, you can see where the monitor was originally bolted to the frame. There’s a spring loaded square bolt clip with bolt toward the top, left of the frame side. There’s also one at the bottom but I didn’t center the image very well, so it’s not visible. I swapped both frame rails to the opposite side that they were originally on so the bolt holes point towards the monitor.
The problem at this point was the curvature of the monitor. Because the frame rails were straight and the monitor curved, I couldn’t get the bolt holes to the corresponding bolt hole on the monitor. I needed to cut a section out of the rail, keeping the top and bottom bolt holes, but removing the middle so it would align properly. Enter the grinder with a metal cutting disc and my vise:
I cut two slots in each rail…you can see where one of the slots is going to be cut in the first picture of the rail. There’s a black line drawn. There’s also one on the other end, washed out by the flash. These cuts were made on both frame sides. The then put each side into my vise and bent the piece back and forth until the center section worked free:
Yeah, I know, my work bench is a mess! I then mounted the newly cut sides to the monitor. The only problem now the a gap between the chassis frame pan and the frame sides. I simply filled each gap with a piece of scrap MDF board, securing it with screws. Here’s a couple shots of the monitor back in the cabinet:
The monitor is now mounted horizontally in the cabinet, perfectly centered both left to right and top to bottom. It looks like I forget a screw in the chassis pan, as it’s not level. I’ll have to correct that tonight. I’m pretty pleased with the results and the monitor can easily be reverted back to a vertical mount if needed. Next up…the control panel.
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