Monitors

Today we've finished all three monitors.

All of them mounted and kept in place neatly and the best of all, they already work.

Isn't that some candy for the eye?

Unfortunately, the backglass mounting didn't work out as planned. We made some adjustments on the fly, so the monitor is now properly mounted, but can't removed without loosening some screws...


As experienced numerous times before on our little project, the backglass mounting is another thing that didn't quite work out as planned and required some improvisation.

We had to make some adjustments on the fly. As you can see, when you take a closer look, the large horizontal bars are backed by wooden bricks above and underneath and additionally braced by small metal plates we'd screwed onto the bricks. It can neither overturn nor fall down anymore.

There's is a slight drawback though, it can't be removed without loosening some screws. Well, for the better part of the next decade, it won't be necessary anyways, so we hope.

Now, having only the monitors wired yet, the amount of cables looks pretty harmless but there're a whole lot more to come, so we figured it'd be best to start with cable management right away. 

Coin door switch

For the coin door switch, we used a leftover piece of wood and mounted a microswitch. No big deal ;)

DMD Monitor

The DMD Monitor is in place! We've posted the plans and a cutlist a while ago, so there's not much to say about it, but it turned out to be a very good solution.

We removed the front case of the monitor to have the monitor directly at the panel without unnecessary space for the bezel between. The monitor buttons are now placed at the backside, where they can be easily accessed if the PC tray is opened.

Buttons!

We designed some inlays for our front buttons! Now the coindoor accepts 50 cent and 1 euro coins. We kept the design of the coindoor inlays very close to the original ones.

Our buttons so far:

• Flipper Buttons
• Magna Save Buttons
• Start Button
• Exit Button
• Coin Button
• Instructions Button
• Pause Button
• Launch Ball Button (in addition to the analog plunger)

If you're interested in using the inlays we've created, here you go:

Soundsystem

We'll use the Creative Inspire T3130 2.1 Sound system, which we picked up used for 25€.  The whole set is 25w total, with 5w each satellite and 15W for the sub itself. Should be powerful enough.
The volume control's on a cord, so it can be placed outside of the cab which is pretty convinient.

Creative Inspire T3130

We decided to take the legs off the subwoofer and put it on foam rubber to decouple the vibrations from the cab. We cut aluminium angles for the frame and put felt on it.

Keychain

Just a little gimmick...

As we have two keys now, one for the coin door and one for the PC Tray / Backbox, we put them on a keychain and made a nice mario-styled inlay which fits perfectly to the mario-themed sideart by stuzza.

Here's the original picture:

Assembling

We placed the buttons,plunger, coin door and USB connectors and made leg protectors.

It would have been easy to create them without a template, but we found one so we just used it. We just took a 4 sheets of felt and cut them. It's not as nice looking as "professional" ones, but it's way cheaper. And you won't see them anyway, so they serve their purpose of protecting the cab.

Here's the link:
http://www.blackknightpinball.com/leg-protector-template.pdf

Now it really begins to look like a pinball machine.

We placed a power button for the PC, a USB Slot and the volume control panel from the speaker system at the bottom side so everything is easily accessible.

Decals applied

For the decals, we thought about creating the artwork ourselves first, but when we looked for resources, we stumbled upon stuzzas artwork thread over vpforums.org

When we saw stuzzas "Mario Pinball Land" artwork, we instantly fell in love with it and decided that we have to use it. 

Here's the thread:

http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=26497

We ordered the decals from virtuapin.net and it was a great decision. 

The quality of the decals is outstanding and the delievery was really fast. It took just one day from the USA to Austria, and a week from vienna to our destination as the customs office took quite a time to release the package. 

We can only recommend virtuapin decals for everyone who's looking for great print quality for a great price. They also offer great support in case you need it.

Here is a link to the shop:

http://virtuapin.net/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=4

We watched a few youtube videos about applying decals and it worked out well.

Speaker grill

We've made speaker grills today! We used perforated sheetings for the grills. Cut it to 110mm x 110 squares, used white spray primer, black high gloss spray paint and finished it with clear varnish.

Paint it black!

I see a white pin and i want to turn it black
No colors anymore, i want them to turn black

Maybe we've listened to much to rolling stones songs, but now our cab is entirely black!

As this was our first time painting it was a lot of trial error. We tried to gather some information about how to paint in the internet, but again we stumbled upon a lot of contradictory information and tips. We started off at our local hardware store, asking for help and we ended up buying a 1K water based paint can and some more foam rollers. We applied the primer the same way and it worked great, so we thought it would be the same with the black paint. WRONG! When we tried to apply the paint it had no grip at all and it looked horrible! We were so upset we didn't even take pictures, but removed everything as quickly and thoroughly as possible.
A few days later we coincidentally talked to a friend about our paint experience and he asked us why we don't use spray cans for painting. We had our (unjustified) doubts about this painting technique and we've tried it on a leftover piece of primed wood that was cut out from our cab. The result was amazing! Exactly what we were looking for.

So we started painting our cab with 1K high gloss black spray paint.

The spray paint we used

Our friend told us to start painting the edges first and then paint the rest. We painted everything outside so we had to wait for windless days. Before the painting we used window cleaner to degrease the surface and get it ready for painting.

We applied a very thin first coating, waited for 10minutes then applied another coating.
Here are some pictures to show you the very satisfying result.

Applying the paint

After the paint was dry, we used 400 grain sandpaper cleaned the surface again with window cleaner and sanded the surface wet, gave it another 2 coatings of black paint and used transparent varnish.

Now we're ready for the decals, which arrived last friday.

Here are some impressions of the painted cab.