My new other baby…

So, Built the new rig about a month ago, its running sweetly, as is the MAME cabinet with the now donated P4 that I was using to test the Win 7 beta.   On a side note I have to say that the whole process of actually setting up the cabinet for MAME was amazingly simple, in fact the hardest part of the whole ordeal was gutting the bad arcade crt and the wiring.   Granted the 17 inch wide screen thats in there now is very ghetto’ly (is that a word?) mounted, it works.   Still haven’t wired up the marquee or the power for the coin door lights, but its miniscule stuff that I’ll do one lazy sunday probably.

Anyways, me and my good buddy Matt came up with an awesome Idea a couple years back when we were both working at the east store.   Matt does custom airbrushing, ya know the realistic flame, hot rod flame, skulls, etc.   I thought it would be a cool idea if I could get him to do a realistic flame case for me, because for one it’d look sweet as all hell, and 2, because I might be able to sell them.    So, exhibit A is the pic of the case before Paint.

and exhibit b, after paint….

Pretty wicked huh?

And thats BEFORE wet sand and buff, thats this weekend.

Only a few problems considering this was our first attempt at doing a case.   First off, I taped the case up.   I taped OVER the drive bay covers so they wouldn’t get covered with paint, problem is that by doing that the paint didn’t lay exactly the way I wanted it to on the edges of the drives.   This isn’t really a big problem as I can just lightly sand the clear a little smoother around them, but next time I’ll just remove the covers entirely and tape behind the panel.    The power led, as well as the hd led and reset button were a PAIN IN THE ASS to tape up, so next time I think i’ll remove those too, I didn’t wanna take the time on the trial run considering they were hot glued in.   Its hard to tell, but the front vents on the bottom of the panel, the dial to open and close them was painted, but since its cheap plastic the paint rubbed off the first time I opened the vents, no biggie, just get all the paint off and touch it up with some 99 black.   One thing I didn’t think about is how much dust would accumulate inside the front panel when it was sprayed, it came right off but jesus christ it was dusty.   And the biggest problem I have is that the temperature last weekend when matt sprayed it wasn’t exactly warm outside, therefore some of the pearl ran a little.   Now I’m gonna try to wet sand it out, however I’m very weary about going through the clear and into the base, but say la ve……If I do go through, I Might just have to wet sand the whole thing a little more, and re-clear the panel with nasons aresol clear and start the process over again.   But for the amount of stuff that went wrong, I’m very happy with the results.

This entry was posted on 3. April 2009 at 05:58 and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.