Shiny stuff underside of the playfield.

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So onto the topside. Slugfest has a plexiglass printed playfield. The printing is on the underside. This is a NOS playfield I got a while back.

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The playfield is held in place by the side rails, bottom rails and the triangular plastics rails. Rails had been painted and all the screws cleaned. The screws go from the underside off the playfield, through a hole in the plexiglass playfield, and into the rails.
Unfortunately, there is a screw hole underneath the batting mechanism plate, so that needs to be taken off.

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Some NOS plastics, bat, home run ramp and pitcher flap and the playfield is done.

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Ah…the cabinet. All I gotta do is strip off the decals and slap on some new ones and I’ll be good to go. That plan went so far off the rails I thought to whole project was going to be parted out.

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For sure I was going to re-decal the cabinet, and I knew the left back corner leg was on a bit awkward, so I’d need to fix that…

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Unfortunately, when I stripped out the cabinet, I was left with not just a busted cabinet corner and a bit of dust to clean up, the bottom of the cabinet was dirty and had a bow in it. That was going to be a problem.

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Before just “popping out, the bottom of the cabinet, I’d see about getting a new bottom piece cut. Here are my measurements.

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So, I go to Home Depot and to get the size I need, I had to get 3/4 inch thick MDF as they didn’t have 5/8 inch thick MDF. I thought I could just plane it down, but that difference came in handy.

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I decided I better make sure I can cut the holes in the bottom of the cabinet before trying to replace it. That’s gonna be the speaker hole, the hole for the power switch, and the 2 vent holes. At this point, I didn’t realize there is also a slot for the cards to fall out from the card dispenser because it was covered by the metal plate in the original cabinet bottom.

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This was the “Here we go moment,” that there was no turning back. I made a guide for the router to keep it a fixed distance from the edge and set my depth to 5/8th inch, the thickness of the bottom.

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So he’s the original cabinet bottom knocked out after using the router at the edge. Fortunately the new cabinet bottom fit like a glove.

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That is indeed a problem I was gonna need to solve.

So after routering out the cabinet bottom I had 3 thoughts:

1.) There is a little groove that is in the cabinet sides that the cabinet bottom fits into. To use that groove, I would need to router out the top lip of the groove so the new bottom could sit on the groove lip. The problem is if I went that route, it would make my cabinet bottom too small. I was not keen on not so much cutting a larger bottom, but it would mean I would have to recut the speaker hole, power switch hole, vent holes and the card shoot hole. Groan.

2.) I now had great access to a damaged back corner that my Elmer’s glue job seemed a little inadequate.

3.) I started to consider getting a new cabinet made.
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I have a friend who gets WPC cabinets made quite regularly. I asked him about a Slugfest cabinet and because it’s a totally different shape than a pin, it would be a custom job. It would have been about $2000…that’s a huge hit to the Slugfest restoration budget.
Because it would be months to get it done anyway, I decided to start by repairing the damaged cabinet corner.

Maybe my future posts will help you with ideas, or maybe I can help you. Kentucky isn’t THAT far.

So the original Slugfest cabinet corners have a wood brace and a metal brace that the leg bolts screw into. The metal brace isn’t very big. I decided if I were going to fix it, I would use one of the sturdier cabinet brackets.

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The new brace (cabinet bracket) wouldn’t sit flush, so I chiseled out the old, broken wooden corner brace. I’m glad I did because I realized the cabinet was out of square.

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I got lucky here a few times. My advice:
Hold the plate on the inside and screw in the leg bolts from the outside. When I did this, my plate was actually going to be too long and I had to trim it first before installing it or else the cabinet bottom wouldn’t sit flush.

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I wanted to replace the original corner wood brace as it was all busted and the plate wasn’t laying flat with the old wood brace in there. I chiseled out the old wood brace and cut new ones. I found the best fit was cutting a piece of 2 x 4 at a corner at 45 degrees so each length against the cabinet would be 1 1/16”. That would make the hypotenuse of the triangle 1.45”. a2 + b2 = c2. Look at that. A little high school math.

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My plan was to re-glue the cabinet corner, glue the wood brace into the corner, then screw in the metal plate with 6 wood screws. Just before I did that, I got lucky because if I did that, there would be no way to put in the leg bolts. My advice: you have to drill the leg bolt holes in the wood braces FIRST, or there is no way to get the leg bolts through.

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So now I have to figure out how to keep the bottom in securely. The original cabinet bottom was in a groove and had these metal cleats in the bottom/side of cabinet. I had no idea how to install these, let alone where to get them. I thought about glueing some of those wooden corner braces to the bottom/side of the cabinet, or maybe metal braces. Finally I decided on the ol’ glue and screw.

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To get good contact between the cabinet bottom edges and the cabinet sides, I decided to fill the groove with wood strips I had from another project. These fit in perfectly. Some TiteBond glue and some clamping, and the bottom would be set for installation.

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So the plan is to use this glue along the outside edge of the new cabinet bottom and along the flat bottom of the cabinet that essentially frames where the coin box will go, and these screws through the outside bottom of the cabinet into the edge of the MDF board and hopefully not have the screws poke out. Technically, I do NOT think that is a run on sentence.

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I predrilled and countersunk the holes all around, taped off the cabinet, mixed the epoxy and spread it on, screwed in the 2 1/2” screws nice and tight, then clamped. I probably should have gotten help because with the glue, there is no time to be dinking around. At this moment, I was glad the bottom piece was 3/4” thick instead of 5/8”.

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This is a little out of order, but was important for the cabinet restoration. My original plan was to take off the back door of the cabinet with all the boards which you need to do for decaling, and then put it back on after decaling. Unfortunately, the plywood was warped like crazy. I tried to think of ways to try to flatten it out, but in the end, the solution was a trip to Home Depot for 3/4” plywood.

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Paint for the new cabinet back door. Remember, spray paint goes EVERYWHERE. I painted this across the street outside. The paint outline is still there on the ground.

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I took off the hinge from the old back door, polished the hinge, polished the carriage bolts, and swapped it over.

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I used this epoxy to fill the gap between the front bullnose of the wooden part of the control panel and the metal plate. I overfilled it slightly after tightening down the metal plate, the put a piece of painters tape across that gap running the length of the control panel to flatten out the epoxy before it dried. I didn’t sand at all because when I pulled off the tape, the gap was filled in and perfectly flat. I have no idea why the painters tape doesn’t stick to the epoxy.
BTW, it’s the same epoxy I used to glue the cabinet bottom on. Along with the screws of course.

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For the lock hole, you need a Forstner bit to make a flat bottom hole.

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