Cabinet:

Restoration Continued:

Before I proceded to prepare for the new paintjob, I decided that it would be a good time to make the cab easier to move around by adding some castors. I wouldn't recommend castors for games that will be played on smooth floors but I do like them when the game is sitting on a carpet. Leg levelers can easily tear up a carpet or badly mar a floor.

The cab had a simple setup, a T-nut on top of a triangular chunk of wood nailed and glued into the bottom corner of the cab. Albiet simple, this isn't a good setup. The hole that goes through the block doesn't extend through the cab floor and since the T-nut is at the top of the hole, not the bottom, there is little or no room to adjust the length of the leg. My cab was completely missing one of the leg mounting blocks so something needed to be done regardless.

I broke out the original leg mounting blocks using an air hammer. I cut out new 6" x 6.5" blocks from a long board. I marked the holes using the castor as a template, and drilled the bolt holes. I squeezed new 5/16" stainless steel T-nuts into the top of the blocks. I attached the castors to the bottoms of the blocks using 5/16" x 1.5" bolts. I covered 3 sides of each caster block assembly with Gorilla glue, then immediately secured them in place using an air-staple gun. When the glue had set, the job was done. The castors can still be easily removed any time by simply removing the bolts.

 

Next came the "body work". This is the part where I get to repair all of the cab's damaged corners, holes, nicks, and so on. For the really large structural repairs, I use bondo-glass, the kind of bondo that has fiberglass in it. For everything else, I use regular bondo. For shaping, I prefer to use the random-orbit sander with 120 grit discs for bulk material removal and 220 grit for finishing.

Here are those corners that used to look so wrecked. Now they are repaired and ready for paint.

 

Bondo goes on pretty easy (and cures very fast) but every one of those blobs still has to be sanded. After sanding is complete, the cab is ready for paint. It still looks worse than before the job was started, but things will get a lot better!

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