Hey there! I got lucky Sunday night (no, not like that). I got a great deal on a somewhat rare item on Craigslist:

I’m not referring to the cat. He’s not that rare, there are loads of them all over town. I put the cat there for scale.

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Behold, the Orange-y Power of Q*Bert

Disclaimers

1. This post is going to be one part tutorial, and one part photo gallery. If you have a problem with that, you can bite my furry orange nose.

2. Warning! This post is a bit long, but it is SOOOO worth it.
3. The fabric looks like crap in some of the pictures, due to the flash. For some reason, it looks almost reflective when the flash hits it. It looks much nicer in person. You’ll have to trust me on that.

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Hey there. I haven’t posted in over 3 months! Man, have I been busy with work.

I bought this marquee about 2 years ago:

I figured I could make an enclosure for it and light it up someday, over the top of my change machine. I have a small, narrow change machine shown here on the left without its base:

Ignore the cats, they were curious.

I spotted the same TOKENS sign in a small arcade at the mall today, on top of a large change machine:

The picture is horrible, but you get the idea. I’d love to make a box out of sheet metal like this one for it, but I don’t have a large change machine to put it on. Someday when I decide to light this up, it will probably just go on the wall above my small one.

On another note, I saw a gentleman at the mall today that looked very cool. Picture the love child of Colonel Sanders and Mr. Miyagi and you’ll get the general idea. If he made me wax his cars, I bet I’d get a big bucket of chicken afterwords for helping out.

I went shopping with the wife today at A.C. Moore and spotted a frame designed to display 20 baseball cards. I’m not into baseball, but I figured it would work well to display my Donkey Kong cards/stickers:

They are normally $21.99, and are on sale right now for 40% off. I saw the same exact one at Michaels for $34.99.

I went to a Flea Market the Saturday before last. First, the creepy doll:

I didn’t buy the doll (not my thing) but snapped a pic of her because she is sooo creeepy. She looks like she wants to kill kill kill.

I did buy an old neon sign, which worked but needed some attention. Here’s before:

and after:

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For a couple of years now, I’ve been leaving the keys for our games in the coin doors. Its worked OK for the most part. One night we had some kids over, and an old key that was already pretty bent wound up in 2 pieces by the end of the night.

I decided it would be good to get those keys out of the coin doors. What better place to put them then inside another coin door?

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I was planning on taking pics of everything as I went along but in the excitement I forgot to. Here’s the gist of how this was made…

Parts from Walmart:

• 8″ white styrofoam ball
• Yellow woman’s top made out of spandex (need’s to be stretchy)
• Mickey Mouse (on clearance)
• Pacifier
• Black fabric paint
• Pink cloth
• Baby Sneakers

Other stuff we had lying around:

• Wooden broom handle
• Metal coat hangers
• Pins
• Thread & Needle
• LCD monitor stand
• Cardboard shirt box
• Finish nail
• Staple gun and staples
• Velcro

You can pretty much tell by the components how this went together. I severed the arms off Mickey (see last post). We made some tubes out of the yellow to go over the black dead mouse arms. I cut some wire from the coat hangers and used them to stick the arms into the foam ball. We made the legs the same way, stuffing them in the shoes and sewing them to the body.

The bonnet thing has a piece of cardboard we cut to shape, to make sure it would stick up.

For the nose, I cut the very tip off a broom handle and put a finish nail in the end. I wrapped the yellow cloth around the wood and stapled it to the bottom. Then I pushed it through the cloth and foam ball and it stuck pretty well.

I had an old LCD monitor stand that I never used and was saving for something like this. I used velcro on the back of her head to stick it to the stand. The stand has some velcro on the bottom to keep it in place, as does her sneakers.

Here’s a couple more pics:

For my last post, I had some pics and a video of the POW block sign I made. I didn’t have much time to write about how I built it, so here goes…

Concept

I love neon and illuminated signs, and for awhile have been thinking about making some sort of POW block sign inspired by the POW block floating above the  middle of the ground floor in Mario Bros:

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Well….this certainly looks like a black acrylic ballot box…

or does it?

I’ve been working my ass off since September, trying to get some work done for my day job. I hope to have that work completed by the end of February, and figured it would be cool to take a few days off then and work on a new project. I’ll provide more details as I work on this, but for now – here’s some of the components I just got in the mail from CoolNeon.com:

I got 2 different lengths and colors of El Wire, and have them hooked to a sound activated driver. The driver has a sensitivity setting on it which can be dialed up or down as needed. Stay tuned for more info.