Hi again, and thanks for the sympathy guys. Well, as you can probably guess from my previous post, I haven't really had the chance to invest much time in my arcade projects lately. I have been doing a thing or two in between all the real life stuff though, so I thought I might share some progress with you guys.
I had a couple of days off, so I decided to go ahead with the part of the restoration that I've been dreading the most, namely the sanding and painting of the cabinet. I'm pretty comfy with doing stuff on a computer, like tracing art etc., but the sanding bit is so hands on - and dusty - that I just wanted to get it over with.
I started out in the shared basement of our building. That was a big mistake. I started sanding for a minute or two... looked up... and could barely see three meters for all the dust. So I lugged the cab up the stairs to my 2nd floor apartment and continued on the balcony. That worked a lot better, but when I was done and looked over at the neighbours balcony I discovered that I had covered all their drying laundry in a fine layer of black dust. I had to go over and apologise, and luckily they weren't too cross about it.
So after quite a bit of sanding - I think I might have gotten away with even less to be honest - I was left with a nice surface. I then went on to repair some damage to the wood by means of some Liberon acrylic wood filler. The filler came in a range of colours, and for some strange reason I decided to go with brown. Smearing it on the cab, it turned out that it had the colour of poo. Nice one, Arch.
I also spent quite a bit of time cleaning out the glue of the T-molding slots. I've ended up buying black T-molding for the cab, which will work nicely I think.
So that is pretty much the state of the cab right now. It has gone into storage awaiting my house move in November. Until then I could do with a bit of advice on how to go about painting the kickplate and front of the CP. What kind of paint would you use to get the glossy black front of the Zac cabs? I have no experience with painting a smooth surface like this, so any advice is appreciated.
So much for the handyman. I've been doing quite a bit of tracing the last few days based on the scans I did in may. You won't believe how many stars this side art has. I've been listening to upbeat chiptunes to work faster, but the monotony of drawing all those stars has been a killer. In the end none of them are similar though, and they look exactly like the original. What remains are the halftones. Getting good halftones can be hard, but I will try to do my best to stay close to the original. I hope to send this to the printers so that the art will be ready when the cab comes out of storage.
Ok, hope you like what I've done so far. Progress is slow, but steady. I've aquired quite a lot of dedicated project cabs recently, but I won't touch them until this one is done. Focus!
