FINALLY! IT'S ALIIIIIVE!

As mentioned in a prior post, I have finished painting the stripe, which now look as good as Masking tape has to offer me. If I ever get inspired, I would still like to put 1-2 coats of polycrilic on for durability, but at this point it's quite presentable with its semi-gloss latex exterior.



I applied the vinyl control panel overlay & inserted all the controls. Then wired 'em up to the Mini-PAC. Given the small CP size, the wiring took me only like 10 minutes since i didn't need to crimp any connectors for splicing extension wire.



Next stuck the cp into the cabinet. It's so tight that it rubbed paint off the cab which will need to be touched up (barely visible just above the left end of the cp on the black side wall) but I don't need to worry about adding screws to hold it or anything. If need be, I have some velcro to give it more stick but I don't think that will be necessary.




Finally here's the full view of the cabinet, in place by my never-used in-wall woodfire rotisserie grill.




As always, there's still a list of to-do's but they're getting to be pretty minor. I've already mentioned that I still want to clear-coat the paint to protect it from little hands & stains. I need to touchup that black paint on the interior side walls where the CP scraped it. The door is still kinda tight due to the already tight fit worsened by the black paint. The plexi is also sorta tight and rubbing - could lose a good 1/8".

And, most importantly, the monitor needs some manner of bezel. I'm picturing getting some black gatorboard or matteboard & making something that way. I know there's some prefab plastic options too but there's so little clearance below the plexi that I'll need something flatter, or perhaps even simply mask the back of the plexi & paint the borders black from behind. This should hopefully solve most of the light pollution from the marquee light reflecting down off the back wall, but if it doesn't take care of it completely, I can put some aluminum foil or styrofoam or something behind the fluorescent tube light up there to make sure the light is going forward only.

The only other remaining business is customizing the interface itself to make the Mamewah menu system as ideal as possible. For some reason I have yet to fathom, it's resisting the display of the background image for the menu (just a solid color instead). Screenshots from the games are showing up just fine though so that's cool. I also want to customize the game lists to feature only vert games.

Status Update

Am I still alive? Am I still convinced I'm almost done? Yes! Yes!

While there's no photos (today) I have finished the touchup painting! I've gotten my CP overlay finally applied & all controls affixed to the CP! This means that all that's really left is to wire up the switches to the MiniPac interface, and then get the Computer running! All said & done, probably no mre than 3 hrs to have the box fully functional.

At that point, I enter into the "fine tuning" phase in which I add minor cosmetic things like a monitor bezel, some light-blocking for behind the Fluorescent marquee light (to kill overspray of light that ends up behind the monitor), and redesigning all the MAMEWAH menus.

Secret Progress

While I haven't updated the Blog in over a month, there has actually been a number of big steps forward...

1) I ordered the marquee from mamemarquees.com. They turned out AWESOME! Here's some pics of the cabinet as it's currently painted (needs just one last coat of touchup for the central two brown stripes). You can also see the marquee lit up from behind. As you can see, I need to put some light blockage behind the light so it doesn't bleed down the back into the monitor region. You'll also see that I still haven't finished the CP yet.





2) I also ordered the CP Overlay from mamemarquees.com.
It looks AWESOME also. Very nice, durable material. I have yet to apply the sticker yet but hope to soon (involves much cutting with razors & fussing about). Here's a pic of the CP overlay held in place



3) Thanks to my dad, I've gotten the hole routered out for the trackball & installed it flush with the top. I still need to putty it over so there's no gap. He also helped me "router" the joystick mount from beneath via lots of holes with a very big drillbit. The reason we didn't use the router on that was that it wouldn't fit (since I was dumb & didn't think to do that before assembling & puttying the CP box). Regardless, it works perfectly and now the joystick is just a bit taller poking up from the bottom, which is nice.




4) Last, but not least, my dad & I put in a wall and door frame, converting the far end of my finished basement into an office. The Metacab Jr. (and, eventually, Metacab Sr.) will go on either side of the door. Yes, that's right, I'll be covering up the basement firepit rotisserie that I'm likely to never use. But not permanently. Some day I just might roast something in a basement firetrap! Note that thanks to Dad's good thinkin', we have an outlet on both sides of the door - one for each arcade cabinet.




So what's left? Well, not much (for Metacab Jr., anyways!). Basically just all this:

- touch up the brown stripes
- apply the CP overlay
- install CP controls
- wire CP
- trim Marquee (needs maybe 1/8" shaved off the bottom to better center the graphics
- insert Monitor
- insert computer
- insert speakers
- connect everything
- customize MAMEWAH vertical layout (I got this working now -- no more directX errors after upgraded to Win2K SP4 and DX9).
- customize MAMEWAH gamelists to be only vertical games, and to have a few categories (e.g. trackball, maze, etc.)
- watch it all work perfectly my first try!

Final CP Overlay & Marquee for MetaCab Jr.?

I think this may finally be the end of the MetaCab jr. design process! I've got a message in to the folks at mamemarquees.com confirming that white on the marquee is translucent (I don't want it transparent lest I see the light right through!). Assuming that's as expected, I'll be ready to order!

Here's the final marquee.


Here's the final CP Overlay (hopefully those holes line up! I won't actually be printing the circles, so if it's off a tiny bit it shouldn't matter, as long as the text doesn't need a hole cut through it.

Latest CP Overlay for Metacab Jr.

I totally revised the control panel overlay thanks to a new font I found. I like this way more & think that it has a better mid/late-1970's retro vibe. It should work well, assuming my measurements are sound and the printout matches the holes I drilled. (Tell me again why i thought it was a good idea to drill *before* the Overlay was printed?!). As before, the overlay will wrap the beveled corner; however now (among other changes) I've pulled the Coin labels up above the bevel, even though the buttons will be below the bevel.



As soon as I finish the marquee, I can get my MameMarquees order placed so that everything can come together (some time next week).

More stripes - Orange...

here's after the first go around of orange. Looks like I'll need to do a bit of touchup on some edges since my masking skills leave something to be desired. Overall it's looking mighty sharp though. Aside from touchup, I'll (hopefully tomorrow?) be working on the next stripes as I progress inwards: More Brown. At that pont it will just be the very center which may be white-red-white, may be orange, or possibly even black-red-black. Who knows what's in store?

THE painting continues...

I figured I'd toss up the latest pics before I go and continue the stenciling/masking/painting process...

here's the cab with the interior/front painted black. I did the first round of masking the brown in. I've got to add more brown later but first some orange.


I am still waffling on whether I'll be having a white with red stripe in the middle (i.e. brown orange brown white red white brown orange brown) - sounds like a lot more time & effort than I'm interested in right now so I might just combine them into a third orange stripe (thus Brown, orange, brown orange brown orange brown). You can never have enough brown & orange if you're looking to do a 70's vibe.




Looking back at my earlier concepts, I've tweaked the cp overlay to match the actual holes drilled.


I'm hoping my measurements will result in a piece of CP Overlay from mamemarquees that fits perfectly. I totally should have drilled *after* getting the CP Overlay. Duh. Well first time making a polished CP & all, so I'm bound to screw up. My other screwup is that I can't router the bottom of the board without totally dismantling the CP (which has already been puttied & sanded). Thus my joystick will either have to be top mounted & routed a bit on the top to make flush, or else just bottom mount it with no routering which results in a shorter stick. My proof of concept CP isn't routered either (and is bottom-mounted). While the sticks seem short, it's entirely playable, so not the end of the world for me. I want to be sure my final Metacab Sr. has them done properly though.

It wouldn't be impossible to just build a whole new CP to fit the cab too - I can use the old one as a template and redrill everything and extend the side boards so that it's fully hidden. Would also be nice to plan the side boards differently so that i could use T-molding along the edges (the current design would cut through some wood if I do that.

Metacab Jr. Primer & CP layout Completed

This weekend I found the time to layout & drill the control panel! I quickly noted that there really just wasn't enough room to fit a trackball *and* spinner *and* joystick *and* three buttons. Instead I dropped the trackball and have a much stronger layout, in my opinion. Since MetaCab Jr. is a vertical-cabinet, I'm thinking I'd prefer the spinner to the trackball anyways given all the great arkanoid-style games and the games that can use a spinner with joystick.


As you can see in the layout, I'll have two buttons in top-left (pause, quit), two buttons in the top-right (P1/P2), joystick, 3 action buttons, and spinner in the center, and then two more buttons (Coin1/Coin2) on the front face. I may still add two buttons to the sides if I find any pinball games that work well in vert mode; I'm probably going to hold off on that idea until I get to MetaCab Sr.

As you may have also noticed, I had the time to apply a whole can of Kilz primer to the entire cabinet. I used a nice little 2" sponge roller which did a great job of applying the paint evenly without runs or brush strokes. The only areas that haven't been nicely whited out are the regions people probably won't see anyways (e.g. behind the monitor bezel, the back, the top). I'll be applying a couple layers of black as soon as I get some new roller heads - the ones I bought to refill the 2" roller I have were totally too loose and fell right off the handle!? So yeah - black up the middle (around the marquee, monitor, front panel, etc. And then some brown with vintage orange stripes for the side art.


I'll be ordering my marquee and control panel overlay from these folks at Mame Marquees. Kira is already on my side for doing that, so that's cool (it would be cheaper but far far far more tedious to try to create these through traditional media rather than digital prints). Plus i'm hoping the CP prints are going to be very durable since they're made for just that. Obviously I'll be designing my own art and not picking any of their stock designs.

Progress at last!

Well after a march filled with emptiness progress-wise, I finally had some time last weekend when my dad was up to hit it again. I did squeeze some work in prior to that too, wiring the fluorescent tube light as well as mounting it. I also built out the rails to insert the plexi for the marquee and various other minor updates including purchasing the pre-cut plexiglass for marquee (2 layers) and the monitor (1 layer).

Below is a pic with the control panel off (I will be putting velcro on the rails, which combines with the tight fit to give it a snug mounting mechanism without any problems removing it later if I need to get at the wiring). As you can see the wood for the top trim of the marquee is too thick (and other stuff I have is too thin). I'll need to rip a good 3/4" off of that on my brother-in-law's table saw at some point.


The primary upgrades we did this past weekend were to add a 2"x6" base to the cabinet, raising it up high enough so that I'm no longer looking straight into the marquee. I don't know if you can really tell from any of the pics but the original cabinet I found was TINY! Not only narrow but short. The fact that there was no lightup marquee at all either (just a piece of wood) so maybe that was why it being short wasn't a big deal. It's now a perfect height for me - much more comfortable and makes me feel like less of a giant (I'm only 6'1"!). We also finalized the mounting of the inner ceiling so that there's a nice track in there to insert the plexi for the monitor - it slides up and behind the back of the ceiling.


With the light on, there's a bit of back lighting coming down... I'll decide later (once it's painted & the monitor is installed) whether that''s annoying -- I may just need to stick something behind the light in the top cavity so that it can only shine forwards. For now I've just got a sized sheet of drawing paper in there and it gives a nice soft glow. I'll be playing with some media to see if there's any way to get a design in there without having to pay Kinko's for some oversized color printing... Here's a pic with the light on and the control panel inserted:


It's really coming together! Best of all, I think I'm finally at a point where I can start doing some work at night (assuming I still have energy) since almost nothing is left to do that requires power tools other than the CP itself. And that I can do in the garage once again now that spring is in the air. My wife has granted me 4 more precious hours of uninterrupted work this weekend so that should hopefully be enough to get the CP in order so that it's time for making painty.

The main things left to be done are these:
- rip marquee top board so that it doesn't stick up above the top fo the sides
- layout & drill/router the control panel
- finish sanding all the wood putty (applying more if needed)
- primer entire cabinet
- paint entire cabinet
- apply painting details to entire cabinet
- figure out a solution for the control panel visuals -- will require either adhesive pre-printed vinyl or some sort of coating to the entire thing which can be painted. I can't simply stick a printout under plexi due to the beveled corner design (well, I could but it would, I think, look & feel weird to have plexi not around to the front face of the CP).

Still no progress

Thanks to an overwhelming lack of free time I haven't had much time to work on Metacab Jr. for a couple weeks. I have brought it out of the garage & into the basement (those subzero days made it an expensive prospect to heat the garage continuously with the propane heat cannon). This made it considerably warmer but also has the unfortunate side effect that it's directly under my son Logan's room. So, no working on it after 8pm (aka my only free time).

I've bought my plexiglass for the bezel and the marquee. I'll post some pics of the progress I've made creating mounting rails for the marquee. I still haven't finalized/printed a design so it's boring looking at blue sticker-coated plexi, but you may be interested to see what's up.

I'm hoping to finish up the construction stuff soon so I can get to the painting. Hopefully the painting goes much quicker since I can actually work on that while Logan's sleeping (as opposed to hammering, sanding & drilling right beneath his room).

In other news, my t-molding (black 5/8") has arrived and the edges have been slot-cut, so I'll be ready for that once painting has completed. Really it's all just waiting on the attachment of the front door, and the woodworking side of the CP construction.

I think I'm currently planning to have the CP feature (left-to right) spinner, joystick, 3-4 buttons, trackball. And then another row either above or on the front face of the CP, which has P1/2, Coin1/2.

I'm also contemplating just hand-painting my CP & side art and coating it with a few coats of clear acrylic polyurethane since that will be way cheaper (and more durable?) than commercially printing on vinyl adhesive sticker.

Metacab Jr. Gets a facelift - part 1

This weekend my dad was in town, so I thought we'd quick overhaul that little freebie cabinet shell I brought home. I pictured a simple process (maybe 4 hrs or so Sat. AM) of adding a control panel, allowing for a marquee, and mounting the monitor. As per usual, I am cursed with a propensity to vastly underestimate the time it takes to do something.


To begin with, we decided the best way to start was to completely disassemble the unit.

I figured that as long as we were going that far, I may as well take off the crappy atari side art, since it was low-res and bubbling up in places anyways. One of the pieces came off in on sheet, so I hung it up in my workshop, but it left behind a vast tract of sticker detritus that took us a long time to get off completely, even with the help of some Goo Gone adhesive remover. Note: Goo Gone is not the same thing as Goof Off (a product I'd already used which would eat through any adhesive in seconds). Goo Gone is a slow-acting citrus blend that takes forever and doesn't really have what it takes to get off that much sticker. After going through over half the bottle, we gave up on it and insttead resorted to the trusty belt sander.


After that, we had all our pieces ready to roll and took a look at them. Since the original Cabinet maker used *very* thin MDF (most of it was 1/2", the side walls were a whopping 5/8") and did a whole lot of shooting screws into the edge of said MDF, there were tons of spots where the wood was splitting. So we then set about figuring out what it would take to put it back together in a way that would be more structurally sound than the original. We decided to use 2"x2" lumber to reinforce all of the edges and provide rail supports for everything (rather than screwing into the edges). This proved to be a good approach, but meant we were effectively re-using the lumber to completely rebuild it. This was a good idea, but a time consuming one. By the end of the first day we had it free-standing again, but the monitor still wasn't mounted, there was no control panel, and it was rough sanded down to look worse than it started by far.


Note also, that when working in the frigid climates such as I am here in Minneapolis, it helps to have a 30,000 BTU propane heater in a sealed garage. We were able to work without gloves and coats (though it was pretty loud whenever we ran it).

We also found that sealing all the holes created by the original manufacturer (as well as covering up all our screwups since we were building without plans and made frequent messups thanks to the wide variety of angles & curves going on) that a bit of wood filler does a great job. It looks like someone did a drive-by shooting on it but has sanded down smooth and will hopefully be completely unnoticeable when I finally get around to priming & painting it.

So at last we were at a point where we had decided the angle to put the 19" Dell CRT monitor at, and dropped it in. As expected, it was way too big for the little 24"x24"x66" cabinet. As you can see, it will be sitting on its side since this will be an upright-dedicated cabinet.


After much option-considering, we finally determined that the primary importance was the user's experience (not the sanctity of the crappy MDF) and so chopped a whopping hole in the back for the monitor to poke its butt through. Hack? Definitely! Does it work? Yup!

We also mounted a board across the back above the hole to reinforce it. And, to prevent sliding left/right (and keep it centered) mounted some 2x2 on the monitor shelf to keep it in place. The monitor is still primarily held in by gravity at this point, but due to how tightly it's wedged into the hole in the back, it won't be going anywhere unless the cabinet gets some serious abuse or is knocked over. At this point i was pretty happy with the direction it was heading.

Enter the challenge of providing a mounting structure for the plexiglass that will serve as a shield and bezel for the monitor. I ultimately decided to go with a similar approach to what DanW & Theo used on their Aarghcade and Time Machine cabinets. Essentially, rather than building a complex picture-frame-esque bezel system, they just dropped a single pane of plexi down, which was masked & painted black on the back side. That said, it was still quite a challenge to figure out how to mount a rail system for them to rest on, yet keep it easy to slide in & out since removal is crucial for getting the monitor in/out or turning it on/off if need be. Not something that will happen at all regularly, but it seemed a good idea to make it easy to get in & out to remove the monitor when moving the cabinet, etc. In combination with the plexi removal, we wanted the inner ceiling simple to remove too since both that & the plexi would need to go in order to allow the monitor to come out. Both the inner ceiling & the plexi will ride rails.

The control panel was intended to be something of a cross between a classic defender cab's shape and a more traditional elevator action-style shape. We reused the cp box from the original, but attached a nice piece of maple to the top. Once attached, we routered the corner to make a rounded edge since buttons/controls will be on the top surface and more buttons (for coin/Player starts) would be on the vertical portion. This turned out really good until we got the idea to use the slot cutter router bit to add a groove for some t-molding along the edges. Strangely enough, a 1/2" deep slot cutter, when used on 1/2" MDF, cuts through it! Who knew? :) We gave up on the t-molding idea and puttied it in. The CP will ultimately have a vinyl overlay sticker applied to protect it, so none of those issues will hopefully be noticeable in the end.


The marquee area was easy enough to make room for a light... we just removed the board that was there. I will be mounting an 18" compact fluorescent light there eventually, and drop some sandwiched plexiglass up there for the art.

And, easiest of all was routing the slot for the T-Molding along both side panels. Setting the depth was a bit tricky but once we switched from my dad's spring-loaded depth router to a more easy-to-control twist-depth router, we were quickly able to dial in on a distance that would properly center the 1/16" slot. The only real bummer there was that since the MDF is only 5/8", I'm pretty much limited to black t-molding. No biggy. When Metacab Sr. is built, it will be done from scratch with 3/4" MDF so as to allow for a full variety of color choices.


What's left? lots! Despite putting in roughly 16 hrs this weekend, I'm probably only about 1/2 done. I still need to decide upon a final CP layout and put that all together. I need to mount the CP to the cabinet. Need to install the plexi for marquee and monitor bezel. Need to finalize artwork and get printed a marquee and CP overlay. Need to re-install the kickpanel/door. Need to wire and install the marquee light and powerstrip to provide simple single-switch powerup. And, of course, need to do some finish sanding, prime, and paint the entire cabinet. I think I will be hand-painting my side art to save some money. If I go with a simple retro striping such as I'm currently envisioning, this should be simple enough to do with some acrylics and/or latex enamel. Once it's all finished, I'll apply a couple coats of acrylic clearcoat to protect the colors on the entire cab.

Metacab Jr. Gets a facelift - part 1

This weekend my dad was in town, so I thought we'd quick overhaul that little freebie cabinet shell I brought home. I pictured a simple process (maybe 4 hrs or so Sat. AM) of adding a control panel, allowing for a marquee, and mounting the monitor. As per usual, I am cursed with a propensity to vastly underestimate the time it takes to do something.


To begin with, we decided the best way to start was to completely disassemble the unit.

I figured that as long as we were going that far, I may as well take off the crappy atari side art, since it was low-res and bubbling up in places anyways. One of the pieces came off in on sheet, so I hung it up in my workshop, but it left behind a vast tract of sticker detritus that took us a long time to get off completely, even with the help of some Goo Gone adhesive remover. Note: Goo Gone is not the same thing as Goof Off (a product I'd already used which would eat through any adhesive in seconds). Goo Gone is a slow-acting citrus blend that takes forever and doesn't really have what it takes to get off that much sticker. After going through over half the bottle, we gave up on it and insttead resorted to the trusty belt sander.


After that, we had all our pieces ready to roll and took a look at them. Since the original Cabinet maker used *very* thin MDF (most of it was 1/2", the side walls were a whopping 5/8") and did a whole lot of shooting screws into the edge of said MDF, there were tons of spots where the wood was splitting. So we then set about figuring out what it would take to put it back together in a way that would be more structurally sound than the original. We decided to use 2"x2" lumber to reinforce all of the edges and provide rail supports for everything (rather than screwing into the edges). This proved to be a good approach, but meant we were effectively re-using the lumber to completely rebuild it. This was a good idea, but a time consuming one. By the end of the first day we had it free-standing again, but the monitor still wasn't mounted, there was no control panel, and it was rough sanded down to look worse than it started by far.


Note also, that when working in the frigid climates such as I am here in Minneapolis, it helps to have a 30,000 BTU propane heater in a sealed garage. We were able to work without gloves and coats (though it was pretty loud whenever we ran it).

We also found that sealing all the holes created by the original manufacturer (as well as covering up all our screwups since we were building without plans and made frequent messups thanks to the wide variety of angles & curves going on) that a bit of wood filler does a great job. It looks like someone did a drive-by shooting on it but has sanded down smooth and will hopefully be completely unnoticeable when I finally get around to priming & painting it.

So at last we were at a point where we had decided the angle to put the 19" Dell CRT monitor at, and dropped it in. As expected, it was way too big for the little 24"x24"x66" cabinet. As you can see, it will be sitting on its side since this will be an upright-dedicated cabinet.



After much option-considering, we finally determined that the primary importance was the user's experience (not the sanctity of the crappy MDF) and so chopped a whopping hole in the back for the monitor to poke its butt through. Hack? Definitely! Does it work? Yup! We also mounted a board across the back above the hole to reinforce it. And, to prevent sliding left/right (and keep it centered) mounted some 2x2 on the monitor shelf to keep it in place. The monitor is still primarily held in by gravity at this point, but due to how tightly it's wedged into the hole in the back, it won't be going anywhere unless the cabinet gets some serious abuse or is knocked over. At this point i was pretty happy with the direction it was heading.

Enter the challenge of providing a mounting structure for the plexiglass that will serve as a shield and bezel for the monitor. I ultimately decided to go with a similar approach to what DanW & Theo used on their Aarghcade and Time Machine cabinets. Essentially, rather than building a complex picture-frame-esque bezel system, they just dropped a single pane of plexi down, which was masked & painted black on the back side. That said, it was still quite a challenge to figure out how to mount a rail system for them to rest on, yet keep it easy to slide in & out since removal is crucial for getting the monitor in/out or turning it on/off if need be. Not something that will happen at all regularly, but it seemed a good idea to make it easy to get in & out to remove the monitor when moving the cabinet, etc. In combination with the plexi removal, we wanted the inner ceiling simple to remove too since both that & the plexi would need to go in order to allow the monitor to come out. Both the inner ceiling & the plexi will ride rails.


The control panel was intended to be something of a cross between a classic defender cab's shape and a more traditional elevator action-style shape. We reused the cp box from the original, but attached a nice piece of maple to the top. Once attached, we routered the corner to make a rounded edge since buttons/controls will be on the top surface and more buttons (for coin/Player starts) would be on the vertical portion. This turned out really good until we got the idea to use the slot cutter router bit to add a groove for some t-molding along the edges. Strangely enough, a 1/2" deep slot cutter, when used on 1/2" MDF, cuts through it! Who knew? :) We gave up on the t-molding idea and puttied it in. The CP will ultimately have a vinyl overlay sticker applied to protect it, so none of those issues will hopefully be noticeable in the end.


The marquee area was easy enough to make room for a light... we just removed the board that was there. I will be mounting an 18" compact fluorescent light there eventually, and drop some sandwiched plexiglass up there for the art.

And, easiest of all was routing the slot for the T-Molding along both side panels. Setting the depth was a bit tricky but once we switched from my dad's spring-loaded depth router to a more easy-to-control twist-depth router, we were quickly able to dial in on a distance that would properly center the 1/16" slot. The only real bummer there was that since the MDF is only 5/8", I'm pretty much limited to black t-molding. No biggy. When Metacab Sr. is built, it will be done from scratch with 3/4" MDF so as to allow for a full variety of color choices.


What's left? lots! Despite putting in roughly 16 hrs this weekend, I'm probably only about 1/2 done. I still need to decide upon a final CP layout and put that all together. I need to mount the CP to the cabinet. Need to install the plexi for marquee and monitor bezel. Need to finalize artwork and get printed a marquee and CP overlay. Need to re-install the kickpanel/door. Need to wire and install the marquee light and powerstrip to provide simple single-switch powerup. And, of course, need to do some finish sanding, prime, and paint the entire cabinet. I think I will be hand-painting my side art to save some money. If I go with a simple retro striping such as I'm currently envisioning, this should be simple enough to do with some acrylics and/or latex enamel. Once it's all finished, I'll apply a couple coats of acrylic clearcoat to protect the colors on the entire cab.

Elevator Action - Ain't She a beaut?

Since I don't have any time to work on the cabs tonight (stupid homework for Work), I won't say much today. Here's a pic I found of Elevator Action. It's that bare-bones minimalism that I hope to recreate. As cabinets go, it's one of the browner.