I had been thinking about making my own custom arcade stick ever since I got into arcade hardware with a CPS2 and MVS mid 2017 but didn’t actually start planning building one until November 2017. Skip forward over a year and I finally have my “almost” finished twin joystick I can use.
PART 1: STARTING OUT
My original intention was to build my own twin joystick casing out of some sort of wood and then also house a supergun including an arcade power supply inside of it and after checking through lots of differing joystick and button layouts I came the decision that I really liked the design of the Astro City 2 player layout and was going to aim for something as similar to that as possible.
While I was doing more research I discovered that many arcade machines including the Astro City used a universal metal control panel that can still be easily bought new online and so I purchased one from Videotronics UK. I now needed a decal to place on top of it and found that the Arcade Art Shop made high quality reproduction vinyl decal that was perfect for my needs:
I now needed to buy the buttons and sticks and decided I would buy the following:
1 x Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT Ball Top Joystick (Green)
1 x Sanwa JLF-TP-8YT Ball Top Joystick (Pink)
6 x Sanwa OBSN-30 Screw In Arcade Button (Green)
6 x Sanwa OBSN-30 Screw In Arcade Button (Pink)
2 x Sanwa OBSN-24 Screw In Arcade Button (Yellow)
I then very carefully applied the vinyl decal to the control panel and cut out the holes ready for my Sanwa buttons and Joysticks to be installed into:
I had already made a few mock up boxes by cutting and scoring waste cardboard from work to try to figure out the measurements that I was going to use for the joysticks casing and used one of the smaller ones to see how it felt with the control panel installed in it after purchasing 8 x Joystick Carriage Bolts And Nuts:
I went through several different sizes of these mock up boxes and never really settled on a size that felt comfortable or how I was going to deal with the cabling and external connectors I would require, especially if I was still going to have an internal supergun and arcade PSU.
The biggest problem however was that I was starting to not want the end result to look amateur in anyway, which was not helped by my lack of faith in my wood working abilities and wanted the end result to look as professional as possible.
While looking around various resources online I discovered images of a few people who were actually just using the upper control panel housing from Japanese arcade cabinets with their supergun setups at home and I really liked this idea but now the challenge was would it be possible for me to do the same.
The uppers from various cabinets seemed to pop up occasionally on Yahoo Auctions but I wanted a complete housing with both and Upper and Under that would be suitable for my current control panel. So this limited me to Japanese cabinets of most which were made by SEGA. I managed to find and download service manuals for several of these machines that helped me find out the part numbers which in turn made my search results begin to be more fruitful.
For Blast City I was looking for part numbers: HOT1501 and HOT1506
Luckily after some weeks I found what I was looking for on ebay of all places from a Chinese seller Yaton6262 who appears to break down arcade machines for resale and does a lot of horrible conversions of arcade games.
I sent an offer to him for the Blast City Upper and Under Control housing he had listed, which he accepted!
Unfortunately the original listing is no longer accessible since this had been purchased way back in January 2018… I had hoped I could post up the original images from the ebay listing and at the time I didn’t think to take any of my own when it arrived. Thankfully I was able to save one of these images from browsing back in my discord discussion log with a friend:
While I already knew its condition wasn’t the best, it was going to require a hell of a lot of effort to restore it.
PART 2: RESTORATION
The first thing I did was fully disassemble it and deal with all the rusty metal parts.
Hammerite Rust Removal Gel was applied to all the metal parts with a brush and re-applied every 20 minutes or so until the rust was removed. A steel wool scrubbing pad with some WD40 was used to remove the gel and various small files were used in conjunction with linishing paper to deburr and smooth all the the edges:
The only drawback to this process is that the original protective plating also gets removed from the metal parts in this process. However this is much preferable to having the rust continue to eat away at the metal.
The actual screws and washers were not worth saving:
So using the Blast City service manual I found out exactly what sizes I required and replaced them all:
2 x Phillips Screw Pan Head M3 (Coin Slot)
2 x Flat Washer (Coin Slot)
2 x Spring Washer (Coin Slot)
8 x Phillips Screw Pan Head M4 (Latch & Lock Bracket)
8 x Flat Washer (Latch & Lock Bracket)
8 x Spring Washer (Latch & Lock Bracket)
8x Phillips Screw Truss Head M4 (Hinge)
Which ran to approximately 0.99p per pack.
Now I moved onto cleaning up the upper control housing which at some point was painted over so the first line of work was to remove all the paint. I coated the entire casing with Biostrip20 and allowed the paint to blister for an hour before using hot soapy water and a cheap plastic pry tool top scrape of the paint.
This had to be repeated several times until it was all removed.
Unfortunately as expected the plastic underneath the paint was in terrible condition and using typical Peroxide for whitening was not doing anything, so I had to resort to giving it a roughly 40% ratio Bleach to water bath with a small amount of very strong Cillit Bang power cleaner mixed in over several days and some arduous scrubbing.
To prevent the metal screw fixings that could not be removed from going rusty from excess contact to water they were all filled and covered with Blu-Tack.
Once I was happy with the results I finished it off by using Novus Plastic Polish grades 1-3 to help remove any minor scratches and bring the casing to a nice shine.
You can see the results below with the finished upper sat on top of the under housing for comparison:
This was all then repeated again on the Under Control Housing. The now free from rust metal hinges/latches and locking mechanism were re-assembled and my control panel was affixed:
The coin slot cover that I had was badly damaged as you can see below:
So I opted to buy a brand new one and found a Canadian Seller on ebay called leadtechgames2012 who still appears to be selling them.
The original Instruction and 100yen coin decals were cleaned with warm soapy water and replaced back into position along with the new coin slot cover:
I now needed to work on the glass instruction cover which needed the black paint surround touching up, the metal clips needed some minor rust removal/polish and the glass itself needed some light scratches removed.
As with the other metal fixtures I used the Hammerite Rust Removal Gel again. I then bought a tiny pot of black glass paint from a local hobby shop but found that even with multiple coats it just wasn’t working and couldn’t match the original black coating on the reverse of the glass.
Since I had some Rust-oleum Painter’s Touch black gloss craft enamel spray paint left from another project, I decided I would try using that instead. So I used black electrical tape to cover all the glass and metal around the edges of the black surround, then coated it liberally with the enamel spray paint and waited for it to dry before removing the electrical tape:
I then used fine grade Cerium Oxide powder mixed with hot water and gently with a microfiber cloth rubbed the glass in circles to help polish out the scratches. I then used grade 1 of my Novus Plastic Polish as it is a much lighter abrasive to bring the glass to a better shine polish before finishing it off with ordinary household polish with a duster:
All the restoration work on the Upper housing was now complete: