I picked up a really beat up “1942” arcade cabinet a few months back. I gutted the thing completely and kept the marque because I wanted to keep the theme. At some point someone had painted over a poorly stenciled hand drawn logo that could be seen through the layers of paint. I had to clamp and glue the bottom layers of plywood of the machine back together as a result of moisture getting in there at some point. Since the layers had separated and the machine had been moved around several times in a storage unit some small parts of those layers had broken off. A few coats of Bondo and some light sanding and I was back up and running.
Where 1942 is only a one player game I had to build a new control panel that would fit in the space that I had. I didn’t really want to overly modify the cabinet. I got lucky and found that someone had made control panels on eBay and it coincidentally fit perfect. I figured by the time I bought the materials and all my time it was worth the $60 just to buy one. The cabinet itself was dirt cheap anyway. I sprayed a few coats of paint over the next week or so when I had free time.
I hit a wall when I injured my hand and severed tendons in my middle and index finger on my dominant hand at work. So now here I am back in business two months later still not completely healed but I can’t sit around anymore.
My next step I want to do is add some webbing to break up the solid color. This should be an interesting experience since I have never done this before. I will add some pictures of my entire process when I get a chance. After the webbing I am going to apply these really nice decals I ordered from this guy who seems to be the only one who has a decent 1942 logo for the side of a machine which was in Madrid. That was an experience in itself. I had to join a Spanish arcade forum to get them and I don’t know Spanish.
I’m excited to be so close but I’m also very interested to see how many games actually work on the SD card I bought. There is allegedly over 100,000 games on it. So there will be lots of trash to sort through. My plan is to plug all the components into a surge protector inside the cabinet and then splice the surge protector into a female end of a power supply connector to the outside of the cabinet (tutorials available on YouTube). It will allow me to have a removable cord on the outside of the cabinet which will be nice. The surge protector I am using is designed so that when one component is turned off everything else turns off along with it. If anyone has any better ideas let me know. Thanks.