My first MAME Cabinet (Part 3)

In this week's blog post I'll take you in to the bowels of El Diablo and show you the actual process involved in transforming an old arcade cabinet in to a MAME cabinet which, hopefully, passes the 'Wife' test (as in will your wife allow you to bring it in to the house when you're done).

So when the cabinet was originally delivered to me, the seller pointed out that a large piece of the arborite (or formica if you're a Yank) had chipped off one of the corners.  After inspecting it further, it would seem that two pieces of arborite had been glued on side-by-side which resulted in a rather obvious seam running from top to bottom.  On top of this, the panelling on this particular side was pretty beaten up.  Also, the arborite on the front panel was cracked and had two button holes drilled into it.  The remaining side had a relatively intact piece of laminate.  Taking all of these factors in to consideration I decided to strip the laminate from all sides in hopes that I could use some of the old laminate to replace the existing laminate on the front panel.  Initially I planned to obtain new laminate sheets to do the sides, but tracking down a distributor who sells to individuals has proven to be very difficult.  In the meantime, I'll use a melamine finish cabinet paint to do the sides, and depending on how that looks, I might be able to just affix side art directly to that.

My first attempt at getting the panelling off in one big piece was a pretty epic fail.  30 year old contact cement is pretty hard, and the panelling itself was pretty brittle.  Trying to use a putty knife to separate the two wasn't working as the putty knife I was using was too narrow.

Using a head gun on the other hand seemed to work pretty well.  It took a long time to heat everything up to the point where the contact cement was soft and pliant, and the fumes were pretty terribad, but the laminate itself was coming away much easier and I was able to use thin sheets of particle board I had lying around to wedge larger portions of the panel away from the cabinet.

Eventually I was able to get the entire sheet away in one piece.  I'll need to clean the old cement off of the back before I can re-apply it, but it should work just fine.  I'll also need to experiment on the best way to cut the panel to size, but I have lots of scrap pieces to work with.  Once I have the front panel cleaned and plugged, I'll use contact cement to glue the laminate on and I'll trim the edges using a router with a trimming bit.  I guess my time co-op'ing at a cabinet making shop might pay off after all.

So now that the sides were taken care of for the time being, I turned my attention to the front panel.  For whatever reason, someone had decided to drill two button holes in to the front, and in doing so chipped the laminate pretty badly.  Also, it seems that the coin door had been installed a few times as there were multiple holes drilled for the studs.  Rather than trying to salvage this, I decided the strip the panel and plug the holes.  Unfortunately, the panel had been screwed & glued to the cabinet itself, so I had to chisel out the supporting blocks in order to get it free.  From what I can tell, three different glues were used to affix the front panel to its various components.

Judging by the expression I don't think the panel was comfortable with what was happening.

With the panel free and stripped I was able to use dowels and wood glue to plug the existing holes.  Once the glue was dry, I cut the plugs flush wit the surface.

At this point I was starting to consider what I would do to prepare the cabinet for paint.  As there was a ton of old contact cement still stuck to the sides, and as particle board would probably suck up any solvent I used, the decision to sand was an easy one.  Next week will cover the prep work I took prior to applying a finish.  If you have any tips on working with arborite/formica/high pressure laminate, please feel free to post!