Sunday, January 01, 2012

Arcade Shelves

I have an old Asteroids arcade cabinet that I started to build on this last summer. That's a different story entirely and it's nowhere near done. In the process of working on that I bought three more arcade cabinets for parts. And this, is their story.

This one was a Golden Tee '98 and was a lot more complete than it looks in this picture. I forgot to take any pictures of it before I started tearing it down. And these are the only pictures you'll see of it because shortly afterward it was totally torn down and cannibalized for parts.



This if Frogger. If you don't know Frogger then I can't believe you'll be very interested in this post.



This is Tutankham. If you don't know Tutankham then you're pretty normal.

I got all three of them for $50. Which is pretty good considering the coin door (not pictured) from the Golden Tee game is worth $50-60 by itself (it's going in the asteroids machine). 

Angel was super excited about having four arcade cabinets in the garage. So much so that she said to me, "You could probably make some pretty cool book shelves out of these. And if you did then I bet they would stay in the garage a lot longer...which would be nice." (If you were paying attention you probably noticed a bit of a lie in that last quote. Angel didn't really have much confidence in my ability to make anything 'pretty cool')

So, with the support, trust, faith and great idea of my wonderful, beautiful, amazing wife I set off on an adventure to turn some crappy hammered old arcade cabinets into some relatively neat storage units.

I don't think anyone is really that interested in a full play by play of the whole process (and I'm not that interested in writing it) so I'm just going to post some of the in-progress pictures for your perusal.










So, these are all pictures of the Frogger cabinet but the Tutankham was pretty much the same except that the front doesn't swing open, it's only accessible through the coin door. Since I'm terrible at remembering to take pictures along the way there are no pictures of the shelves in the screen opening...

Once I got enough done on them Angel reluctantly agreed to help me move them out of the garage and into the basement.







I'm pretty happy with them so far but I'm not actually completely done with them. If you'll notice they don't have their coin doors on them. I haven't gotten around to that and I need to figure out how I want to light up the ones on Tutankham. Also, I have a whole other project to work on the Frogger one involving lighting and my Christmas present:
Stay tuned for that one.

2 comments:

crazy lady said...

Ahhh...nice to see the post with accompanying images to document the process. Not to mention the clever accompanying dialogue. I DO think they are pretty nifty and can't image that the coin doors will make them more exciting- but I'm guessing you "could" prove me wrong :0)
Well done Mister!
Can't wait to see the "finalized" version of the arcade game...You ARE taking in progress photos of that...right?

Lost Woman said...

I do not know "Frogger" (or any other arcade game save Pacman) but was interested in the transformation regardless. I'm always up for a good before and after shot of anything.

Very clever an unique way to store toys and kids vids. It seems the family creativity has not skipped any of you.
What's up with the blinking light video? A foreshadowing of Frogger to come?