I´ve been thinking about you, Etiènne and your challenge a lot today, and from the pictures I must say that the result is looking good so far. 
Thanks Erik !
About the day: Because I was sick for a day last week I didn't finish the preparation completely. We still had to do sanding of some bondo spots. However, this also quickly removed the primer and thus made the original artwork re-appear with sometimes interesting results.....a little "monster" appeared
Anyway, we sanded everything (again) until everything was as smooth as a baby skin.....at least we thought.
One thing we definitely learned was that just hands and eyes can NOT be trusted to judge wether a "bondo spot" is absolutely flat...... I really think I have to use something like a metal ruler on it's side in the future to check this, hey I'm an amateur when it comes to woodwork...
The result was that if you look across the final result (from the flat side) you will notice some spots that were bondod, simply because they weren't as flat as we thought....
I was warned by someone that you would see every little uneven spot under the stickers and I really took this advice by heart but it was even worse than I thought.
The reason is that the stickers (at least these) are very very very very very thin. I was pretty surprised by how thin really. Of course previously I had only done CPO's and black vinyl which are immensely thick compared to these stickers...
Following this, indeed you will see every uneven spot HOWEVER, that is only when you look "across" the artwork, not when you look straight on it.
We did manage to get absolutely no "speckles" under the artwork which would really show worse...
We did a lot of measuring and checking how to position the side art. During this process we noticed that the pictures of the flyer and the one's in the Ms.Pac manual have a lot different side-art than the actual machine has (had).
Compare:
The flyer. Notice that the letters of the Ms.Pac-Man name are yellow compared to pink. There are also more "edges" around it. There is blue on Ms.Pac and the big ghost has a much larger pink part.
Here's a picture of my machine when I got it:
so it's clear the art that "arrived" on the machines was a lot different.
We also noticed a small size error on the repro: The Ms.Pac Man name part seems to be a bit too small. On the original the top of the M is closer to the top yellow/pink band, the elbow of the small Ms.Pac is closer to the band's end and the far right top of the N should extend further to the back of the cab than the yellow/pink band does.
However, this is all very very minor and doesn't bother me at all.
About the installation process: we closely followed Rich's/This Old Games' excellent tutorial video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RNrYnhHR-cThe only difference was that we put the cab on two beer crates to have it a bit higher up to work on. (Used folded blankets under and on top of the crates to protect the side of the cab and the floor...
We didn't trim any of the vinyl before starting because there is not that much to remove really because of the Ms.Pac cab shape.
Everything else we did the same. We used Rich's great squeegees which he kindly to me !
It was really good we were with two guys though, we both worked up the art on one side of the cab this makes it a lot easier.
Did we install it without creating any bubbles ? No.
It seems close to impossible to do so even though we went really slow. However they were not that big and I decided to leave them alone because I've learned from CPO installs that they go away "magically" over some days. Rich says you can carefully heat the artwork and pull it back a bit to get rid of bubbles and that may be true for his products but I would really not advice to do that on this stuff because it's so thin, and if you heat it and pull it too much, the colors fade immediately (as I learned later, but that was while doing the edges. The stuff is so thin, we were going very very careful because we were scared to go "through" the stuff if we pushed too hard on a part that was not on the side of the cab yet...
Anyway, the further up we came, the less bubbles we got. We also learned that you should go in a more or less constant motion. If you pause half-way you tend to get bubbles earlier than if you don't.
So, after reaching the top it was time to trim the edges. I really liked Rich's idea of heating the edges and than folding it around the edge of the cab using a heat-gun.
This actually worked very well and was very easy to do. The main thing is set your gun to low heat, keep the gun at least 40 cm from the artwork, it gets soft very quickly and then it's really easy to fold it over the edge and stick it there.
Luckily the Ms.Pac is a really easy shape for the edges.
As an expirement I heated some of the blue excess artwork and pulled "too hard" on it to see what happens. Well you get a "white" spot if you that so you do have to be very careful.
Than I cut all the excess material in the T-molding groove and we were done.
All in all, this is again one of those jobs that you only learn by doing, it's not as hard as you think.
Most of the bubbles have already pulled away and I'm sure in a day or two all will be gone...
Now, we only finished one side because two reasons.
1) Etienne had a serious problem with one eye which he may talk about later here.
2) I wanted to re-check the sanding/bondo/primer of the other side and the kick-plate to check if I can get it as flat as I possibly can.
The somewhat uneven spots don't bother me that much on the first side we did, after all no cabinet was ever perfect when it left the factory, but there's no harm in taking a bit more time and trying to do even better....
Now Joeks, about the blue color:
Here's a pic of from Phoenix' website of the installed graphics:
On this picture I'd say it's much more "baby" blue than it is in reality. Remember that a lot of different camera's and maybe software enhancements may be used on pictures on the internet. There is also a lot of difference in light situations so, no two pictures will show the same blue I guess (and your computer monitor probably already looks different than mine ....etc.
Anyway, I tried to match the paint to the stickers because of course there was no other option !
If I compare the color of the stickers to the original paint on my cab I'd say it's slightly darker HOWEVER that paint is 30 years old and very faded, if you notice how much the pink was gun you know that it has had a lot of sunlight....
So, there is never a way to be 100% accurate on colors when doing repros.
Joeks, there's also a "Verfkoning" in Breda (same company) and the paint I got is:
Hermes Vakverf
Zijdeglans (semi-gloss) PU lak
Basis Z
There doesn't seem to be a RAL code on the tin, I'll check if I documented it earlier in this thread....
Concluding, I do not regret selling my Stencil set at all ! The result is absolutely great !!!
