I've started to customize a few machines - not for resale, but just for myself. I thought I post messages as I go along so you can learn as I do.

My first project was a "Spriggan" pachislo. Spriggan is a Japanese anime film about a secret army protecting the world from evil. The front corporation that runs the Army is called ARCAM. Since ARCAM is also the name of the audio components that my company imports from Britain, I though it would be fun to have a Spriggan pachislo.

The idea was to do this first machine the quickest and easiest way. The graphics came from the Spriggan movie website. The picture was intended to be used as PC wallpaper. I did some minor edits to make it fit the proportions of the belly glass.

The base machine was one of pachislo.com's $49 Hanabi wholesale specials. Here's the step by step:

1. Remove the original belly glass. There are several tabs that are accessible from the inside of the front door. Press these and the entire belly glass assembly will just pop off.

2. Remove the original belly glass from the frame. There are 2 metal strips holding the glass. Taking out a few screws lets you remove one of these and the glass just slips out from under the other.

3. Get some Lexan from Lowes. You want the thickness that is about half the thickness of the original belly glass. $10 buys enough to do a couple of machines.

4. Using the original belly glass as a guide, cut the Lexan to size. You'll need 2 pieces because you will be sandwiching your artwork between the sheets. You can cut the stuff with a table saw, but I just used a scoring knife and snapped it. Stanley makes a special plastic scoring knife that you can also find at Lowes.

5. Print your artwork. I did this the quick and dirty way. I used the Xerox Docucolor 12 copier at work which will print 11 x 17 in color. Just did it on plain paper. You might think you'd want to use transparency film, but because you can't print white, you want something with a white background. (Backlit film would probably be better, but that's for the next project).

6. I had one extra printing step because I printed the ARCAM logo in reverse on the back side of the paper. This allows the ARCAM logo to show when the pachislo is on, but it totally disappears when the power is turned off.

7. Sandwich the artwork between the 2 sheets of Lexan and put everything back together.

Here's what it looks like (shown with the power on and off):

http://www.audiophilesystems.com/~wa...o/spriggan.jpg


Coming up next - experiments with backlit film.