Unfortunately, the Craigslist post didn't tell the whole story. The cab was literally moldy and rusty. If that weren't enough, someone decided to give it a piss-poor paint job. In the wrong color. With little attention paid to masking.
So. I decided to spend all of the money that I saved by avoiding shipping on a restoration.
Here's a decent "before" shot. It captures the poor paint job, as well as the rust and mold (look inside the service door). The playwood that the PSU was mounted to had some black mold growing on it. Note the painted-over cam locks.
At this point I decided that I wanted to get the cab sandblasted and powdercoated, but before I could do that, I needed to make sure I could get replacement stickers, etc.
Starting with the kick panel. Most sellers of this stuff only sell it in a minimum quantity of one shitload. After a full day of Googling, I found Eagle Mat, who sent me this:
Which is pretty close to the original:
Then I started searching for the S*T*A*T*U*S sticker. No luck. So I made my own. Which was a pain in the ass, because I am not a graphics designer by any stretch. I learned a lot about vectors and the like. The end product came out spot on. I also picked up some Sanwa 1PLAY 100¥ stickers from arcadeshop.de:
Replacement hardware:
New shoes from Grainger (item# 4TPY6) had to be sawed down:
I wired the cab for good ol USA of A electricity... In other words, it's now properly grounded, and incapable of being plugged in with reversed polarity. Before:
After:
I now felt safe getting the cab sandblasted and powdercoated. So I did:
Before:
After:
Copied manual from Pat70 @ Arcade Otaku:
Some PRAZA CAPCOM tokens from STV:
STV also sent this SFII CE kit to accompany the board I picked up from Starpine:
It should be noted that I bought the kit/board to match the control panel overlay. I don't even like Street Fighter that much.
Here's a before/after shot.Before:
After:
I had all of the pieces to the puzzle, except a marquee holder. My local glass shop cut a couple pieces of plexi to hold me over until FrancoB can get to my order:
POP in action:
New locks, and a keychain from the SF2 pinball table:
Obligatory convergence pic:
And... The finished product:
The cab doesn't have a rotate mechanism, but 18" monitors are small and light enough that the the job can easily be handled by one dude:
Finally, I found this business card in the cab. Some Googling makes it sound like this guy was importing cabs in Los Angeles in the early 2000's. From what I can gather, this cab was in Japan until at least '96. It then found its way to LA, then to Chicago, then to Michigan... Possibly with some undocumented stops in between.
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