I've not had much time to do a lot with this, but have made some recent progress. This was a Centipede cabaret, but at some point in it's life it had been converted to a pinball video game. Which means it'd had holes drilled and flipper buttons fitted to the sides.
I struggled with deciding what to do with it. It came to me with most of the difficult parts to find to turn it back to Centipede, apart from the bezel, which was never going to be easy to find. Plus I'm not massively keen on Centipede.
I've been after a Tempest cabaret for a while, and Centi and Tempest cabarets (bar a couple of extra vents on the back) share an identical cab ..... A Tempest conversion was always going to be difficult. For a start I'd need the cabaret marquee and control panel - impossible - I know of a guy in the US that's been looking for those parts for about a year. And then there's the small matter of a colour vector monitor ....
Cut a long story short, this little lot fell into my lap. Very unexpected, but very welcome:
The Tempest PCB set wasn't part of the deal - I dropped lucky with a US seller for that. I also dropped lucky with getting hold of a WG6100. Picked up a WG6100 tube, with zero burn, cage, and HV unit. Snagged a neck card shortly afterwards, and I have a deflection PCB about to arrive from the US.
So, the Tempest conversion is on. The biggest cosmetic challenge was sorting out the sides. The holes that had been cut for pinball buttons couldn't be covered up without sorting the rest of the sides. Plus, the sides were in pretty poor shape - so I decided to renew the sides completely.
A case of sand, fill, sand, fill, sand, fill repeat repeat etc etc.
Here's the cab at its worst:
The wood around the control panel area had really suffered. I imagine this was from when the cab was operated as a pinball game - would have been the natural place to grip whilst using the flipper buttons on the side:
The other side of the cab was in better nick:
Here she is, looking in need of a bit of work .....
Anyway, yesterday I finally finished sanding and filling, so time to apply DC-Fix to the sides. Large roll, cab laid on top. Traced outline with a pencil, then roughly trimmed:
Applied, and trimmed with Stanley blade:
T mould applied:
New Bezel, bezel retainer, and control panel fitted:
That's about it for now. Still have to renew the other side and apply t moulding. Next up will be the front ....... Still a long way to go on this one, but it's a start.
