Sometime towards the middle of last week, I got sick of dealing with useless jerkfaced bastards customers and quit work early. I headed to the garage to start working on prepping my Baby Pac cabinet for painting.

Look at all the crap I had stowed away inside:

I gutted the inside, took off the back door, and the coin door. I then got on my hands and my knees (sorry, no pic) and cleaned out the inside of the cabinet with the ol’ shop vac and some Fantastik.

Don’t let the weird dust floaty thingies in that pic fool you…I scrubbed every inch of this bitch.

The top support on the back of the cabinet had a big crack in it, which you can kinda make out in this crappy photo:

We all know that crack kills…

…so I had to fix this. I slathered glue all over the affected area, and shot nails haphazardly until it seemed to be structurally sound.

It’s not perfect, but once I go at it with some Bondo and the sander it should be like new.

Hmmm…what else did I do? Oh yeah… the control panel hinge was disgusting.

I put my trusty wire wheel into my drill and went at it until all the gunk/rust/rat droppings were gone:

You can see the fine lines from the wire wheel, but I really don’t care. This hinge isn’t visible, and now it’s not all full of sludge. I will probably spray it with some polyurethane to prevent the rust from coming back.

The last thing I did was to fix the bottom back panel, which was coming off a bit in the right corner:

If you take a look inside, you’ll see the problem:

You can see where the back pulled away from the 2 blocks that it was nailed to. I decided to fix this with some screws. I drilled some pilot holes for them, and drove ‘em on in.

The heads of the screws were sticking out, and wouldn’t pull in anymore. Now, if you’ve done some screwing you probably know that in some materials a screw head will sink right in, and bury itself below the surface. In this case, that didn’t happen. I pulled the screws back out, and drilled again with a countersink bit:

I went nice and deep, because I really wanted to pull this piece of wood way in, and I don’t care about the holes. They will be patched up with bondo later.

Screws back in place:

You can see how the back panel has pulled back in where it belongs. I’ll probably tack a few nails into the back from the sidepanel as well at some point.

After doing all this, I really wanted to keep going but it was getting late. I figured I’d get back to it on the weekend. This past Saturday I went to my grandparent’s house to help cleanup their yard. I got a nasty sunburn, and hurt my knee some how. That pretty much put me out of commission for a few days. I’ve been hobbling around like a 90 year old. The hobbling has now almost dissapeared, and I think I’m going to get back in the garage this weekend and start sanding this puppy. WOOF!