Mr. Do!
This just in, popular ‘Mint’ arcade games CAN still be found
Found? More like tracked. Four years ago, nearly to the weekend, I was at a local Sherwin Williams picking up yellow paint to use on my newly acquired Pac-man arcade cabinet. With the backdoor in hand for color matching I met a girl who knew the significance of that piece of wood which started a dialog that led me to make some interesting finds. (more…)
Tracing stenciled arcade artwork with vellum
The problem with reproducing arcade cabinet artwork always starts with proximity to the game. Scanning a cabinet is a ton of work, and when combining the stitching in Photoshop of all of the pieces, you might be looking at 6-12 hours on that task alone. The nice thing with stenciled artwork is that the design is usually highly refined and more simplistic, which means it is easier to do a tracing to get the artwork to a workable format. Here are some visuals. (more…)
Mr. Do! Roadtrip to Chicago
It’s been about six weeks since I finally acquired my Mr. Do! arcade game in Chicago. Having looked for just over two years for this game only now can I laugh when I remember what Joe Magiera said when I first met him in the fall of 2006. (more…)
Universal Mr. Do! is finally mine!
It was a crazy week, an exam and two papers and then the July 4th holiday weekend and a fun time with family. But at the end, I knew that I would be traveling to finally pick up my own, original, Universal Mr. Do! arcade game. (more…)
May 24th, 2007
Got the game into the basement tonight, for it’s final resting place for awhile. The monitor was great in the garage until I moved it around, and then when we moved it into the basement it got better again. Was a ton of work though, figured out that we can’t have a game facing out with it’s back against the window. The back really has to be against the guest room closet wall. But it works.
Cutting wood for Mr. Do! control panel
Tonight I went over to a friend’s to use some of his tools, and have him help me cut up a board to use on the back side of the control panel. It was some composite wood from a shelf, that we cut down to size, drilled the holes for the joystick and the two buttons, and then did some holes for the bolts to hold the clips on. He had a cool drill bit with a counter sink, but the hole size was just a fraction too small. Plus, the holes we drilled with his wood blades were just a touch too small. So, now I need to see if I can possibly purchase some wood blades to make the holes bigger, and look again for small but longer carriage bolts. But things are very close.
May 16th, 2007
Got out tonight and worked on the control panel. The control panel I am using is a rusted, beat up Pac-man with most of the chewed up overlay still on it. I had gradiose ideas of taking that off in one piece and keeping it, but sad to say, in the end it was anything but in one piece. I did some scraping to take away the outside plastic layer with a 5 in 1, and then started trying different chemicals to get it off.
I had read Acetone worked really good for getting Midway overlay’s off, but all that did was take off the painted artwork for the overlay, it did nothing for the 3M adhesive. I tried Goof Off, and that worked fairly good, but the best was the same remaining paint stripper I used on the cabinet (Stripeeze). That got me right down to the painted panel.
I got it sanded down fairly well. I thought briefly about leaving it as just the metal color, but I would have had to work that much harder on the details to get out all the small areas of paint left. I didn’t need to in painting it over, so I wiping it down, and gave it two coats of spray paint before the night was over. Looking pretty cool, amazing how nice it looks after you do that. I was pretty surprised when I sanded down the exposed panel on the Pac-man I have.
Next is setting up the wood for the backside, which a friend was going to help me but he may be busy for awhile now, I am not sure.
