Somebody destroyed a Centaur. At least it was a Centaur 2.

About 20 years ago I acquired a beat-up Centaur 2 playfield. When CPR reproduced the Centaur playfield, I decided to do a rebuild to a standard Centaur, but only recently have I had the time to start the project.

I've acquired other cabinet parts and stuff over the years. I have the harnesses from a Centaur 2 but only the cabinet harness will work. The head harness is routed differently, but I should have everything except the head harness and the knocker (someone cut that off).

I've been building a cabinet from scratch and plan to paint it in the reversed colors similar to this:
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/centaur-silver-cabinet

There are a few tweaks to make it look the way I want though. I wanted to keep the girl and the symbols next to her the original colors. PinballPimp made some modifications to the side stencils on request:
Modified stencils

Most of the parts:
Playfield and cabinet parts

CPR playfield:
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The first task is to build a new cabinet. I wanted to keep the original Bally design but add some improvements where necessary. But, in general, the Bally cabinet isn’t’ the most efficient thing to assemble. It’s somewhat of a puzzle. I imagine they used lots of jigs to get these things together.

I am using 3/4” Baltic birch. Well, not quite. You’ll find out that 2023 plywood isn’t the same dimensions as 1980 plywood. I am using an old blown out Vector cabinet as my template and each piece is exactly ¾” thick. But plywood is now 18mm thick which is about 1mm thinner. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it can add up when you are trying to piece together this cabinet puzzle and you find pieces don’t match up. You don’t want your glass binding because you were 2mm off on your dimensions. The key is to determine if you are more interested in matching inside dimensions or outside. Metal brackets and glass aren’t easy to adjust if your wood is off.

An annoying part of the early Bally cabinets is the constant angles. Because the body is sloped at about 3.5 degrees everything on top of that must be cut at 3.5 degrees or the compliment. And I mean EVERYTHING. Even the metal hinges need to be adjusted. I can see why cabinet designs use a plateau for mounting the head these days.

The first to be cut are the cabinet sides and the evil 3.5-degree slope. The easiest way to do this is with a handheld circular saw. It’s easy to do with a sharp blade. First, I cut the entire panel to length, then marked the front height and the back height and aligned a guide rail for the saw. The back panel was small enough to fit on my table saw.

Cutting side panels

For the front panel I used my CNC router since it has a couple of cutouts. This was probably overkill since the cutouts are not that difficult to do with a handheld router.

CNC routing front

There are some dados cut into the sides for the bottom and head supports.

Finished sides and front

I am using a double rabbet joint to join the corners. And then glue and screw it. A rabbet joint would probably have been fine though. The original joint is too complex for what I am trying to accomplish.

The bottom piece is a piece of 1/4” (or 6mm) birch plywood.

Using some old cabinet parts to do a sanity check is required to make sure I am not too far off on any dimension.

Sanity check

If you have a sharp eye, there is a flaw...

Added the cross braces to the cabinet and glued and screwed it all together. This is where you need to double check everything because there is no going back. The cross braces are dadoed into the sides and so is the cash box area. And make sure the T-Nuts for the transformer board are secured to the bottom of the cross braces because there is no getting them in if you forget.

Body assembled

Bossy assembled

Next is drilling the leg holes. I designed and 3D printed a jig. You start with a 1/4" bit to get things started and then move up to a 9/16" bit.

Hole jig

Like I said earlier. I'm trying to replicate the cabinet as closely as possible but add upgrades where they make sense. So I'm adding metal leg protectors.

Leg protector

We have legs:

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They will be sealed. I've done a lot of joinery over the years and haven't found it to be an issue. You would really need to abuse it to get the glue to fail and open the seam. The end grain will be sealed and should show after sanding.

Probably not necessary but for completeness I added the vandal plate. But upgraded it to diamond plate.

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Yep, the thing just doesn't look friendly.

With the body done, this creature now needs a neck. This is where angle hell starts. Every piece needs to be cut at 3.5 degrees. The goal is for the top to be parallel with the bottom and the back to line up with the back of the cabinet. So, every piece is either ripped at an angle or beveled at an angle. Even the hinges are bent at a 3.5-degree angle.

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To get the front trim parallel with the front and back of the cabinet, it has to be beveled. The rabbet should be too in order to get the best glue joint. After taking apart a Vector cabinet, that seems to be what they did back in the day.

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If everything is angled right, the back should line up.

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And the front trim should line up with the slot which is parallel to the front and back. It's not super critical since most of it is covered by the playfield and glass trim, but I know it's there.

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These are the hinges I yanked off of a Vector cabinet. I thought they were bent because the head had to be bolted on with a steel plate and looked like it had fallen off the back of a truck. So, I assumed the hinges were damaged. But apparently, they were bent at the factory to square up when the head is attached.

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Now it needs a head.

It is, mostly because it's a bit of a puzzle. Feels like playing Jenga. I'm not even sure how they came up with this design. The head has some weird things going on too.

On to the head. We are out of the angle zone now so it's pretty much just a square box. Except for the face frame which has and angled cut but that isn't too critical.

The difference in the plywood thicknesses comes into play a little bit. If you take the original outside dimensions, then there is a little too much slop for the back glass and the lock bar. I went with the inside dimensions.

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The back is a 1/2" piece of Baltic birch cut to fit inside the opening. There is some glue holding it in but it's mostly secured by the inside corner supports.

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The face frame is cut from poplar. which seem to be what they used originally. Ther are also two pieces of molding that were custom cut. One goes on the top piece of the face frame, the other acts as the bottom of the face frame. I used clear pine which is pretty soft and ran them through my table saw until they looked like the right profile. They have slight round overs which I did with some 150-grit sandpaper. I found bits that makes these, but they are expensive and look very scary.

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There are a lot of notches in this thing to accommodate the lock bar. If you don't add them before assembly then it will be difficult to fit the lock bar later. The lock bar must have caused some headaches during design. It requires the main part of the head to have two notches cut out. Then the top of the face frame needs a recess routed out. And then, finally, the top trim needs a hidden slot. All of this allows the lock bar to rotate and not hit anything. There is also a dado that runs the length of the top of the frame that is slightly wider than the thickness of the backglass plus it's plastic edging. This is critical or your backglass isn't going in.

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If all goes well it should look like this. All of those notches should be hidden.

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Always test your Centaur head with a Vector backglass. Centaur doesn't have a lift channel yet and I don't want to drop it either. Vector and Centaur have the same thickness (1/8"). Older backglasses can be 1/4". Make sure you get the right thickness for your machine. You can see what I call the "awkward notch" (it just looks weird) on the side of the frame for the lock.

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Now make sure the head actually lines up with all the mounting holes and hinges.

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The light panel is cut on the CNC router out of 1/2" MDF.

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Yep, that was the inspiration. I don't have the ability to do the finer shades that you used so it will be a basic 3 paint finish. Mostly thinking about what finishes might work with the armor. Playing with ideas in Photoshop helps.

A Centaur 2 to Centaur conversion is more than just a cabinet swap as you mentioned. The head harness just won't work other than salvaging it for some wire or connectors that may be hard to get. I'm looking into getting one made but if that falls through, I can route it myself. It will take a while, but I have the time. The cabinet harness is similar but appears to have some updates to the connectors where it joins the head harness. But those can be swapped out. But it's a learn-as-you-go things which is part of the fun.

You sharp eyed folks were able to see my screw up. There's always one, hopefully just one but I'm prepared for another.

I'm using a blown-out Vector cabinet as my template. It looks like it fell off the back of a truck, so I took it apart for measurements. I know each cabinet probably has some small differences, but I forgot that Vector has a much different playfield. It's got an upper playfield which makes the playfield sit lower. I used the front panel as a template which made the shooter rod hole too low. When test fitting the playfield, the rod would actually shoot UNDER the playfield. I guess it could be used as a manual multi-ball launcher.

Two options. Throw away the entire cabinet and start over. Or just plug the hole and route a new one. I'm not one to do it the hard way so I plugged the hole. Just cut out a plywood plug roughly the shape of the hole. A little smaller because you want a good amount of glue slop. The glue helps expand the plug and fill the seam all the way through. Wait until it dries, then sand smooth.

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Then make a new template out of MDF and use a pattern cutting bit on your router. But probably get the actual measurements off of a real Centaur first.

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Hole where it is supposed to be.

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And double check with an actual rod.

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Repeat for other screw ups.

One missing piece for the cabinet is the metal playfield supports. I never actually use these since I just rotate the playfield back to the head and secure it with bungie cords. But they are in the original and I wanted them. My Vector cabinet has something similar, but they are much bigger and would probably interfere with the drop target mechs that are located on the sides of the playfield. I think Centaur had to use a modified version.

I took some 3/4" aluminum L-bar and bent it in a vice break.

First, I cut a couple of 90 degree notches where the bends are.

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The vice break makes pretty quick work of it.

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Looks like a pretty close match.

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If all looks good, make another one.

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I strive to be authentic.

Playing around with some painting ideas. Centaur was silver on black. Reversing that makes it black on silver. I think the side rails can be black. I would like to add more red, maybe in the form of some metal flake in the side rails.

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It's been a while. I've been experimenting with different paints. Painting silver is not for the lighthearted. Especially large areas of it. I went with the Molotow spray paints. The silver adheres well and is very shiny in the sun. Ther were other silver paints that looked slightly better, but they lifted when an adhesive was applied so they stencil would have just ripped the silver right off. Silver paint has a lot of silver flakes in it to give it the metallic look and that doesn't always bind with the surface well. I sealed the silver layer first with some Montana Gold gloss varnish. I needed a fairly uniform surface for the stencil and silver is difficult to lay down uniformly because of the flakes.

The overall effect if pretty cool. It's difficult to photograph silver paint without it look like gray but in the sun the silver really shines. The head worked out well but I imagine the cabinet is going to be a lot harder.

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