Araiguma Battle : Soul Calibur 2 ! (Conversion / Restoration )

[Um Jamma Yammy]

Frame has been worked out, @themisterfalcon from Birdland has been super helpful in sharing a lot of knowledge about stuff. Like when I mentioned the spacing of the "side bars", turns out you size them to fit the width you need for the chassis. Also no additional bracing is required. 

So I've got those spaced correctly, and one issue we ran into was that the "dogears" on the tube were not compatible. They had to be modified by opening them up with a file so fit our bolts though. Nothing terrible, but we might run into mounting issues pretty slightly and will need to pull the monitor back out, frame back off and make adjustments and put it back in again. 

   

Next up, with a consumer assembly, you have a really large chassis. Arcade chassis do one thing. Make video. They don't have audio sections, they don't have a tuner section, they don't have a crap ton of different input options, all this extra stuff a home user would need. Arcade chassis is purpose built to control a tube. 

So what needs to be done is a few things. Figure out the size and position of the original chassis plate, what all can be removed for clearance, and what if anything needs to be relocated by lengthening cabling. Thankfully this BA-6 chassis combined like 5 boards, it's a lot less work.

So here was the chassis holder, clamped to a chair ready to be sawed down after all the measurements were marked (camera not really picking up the pencil marks here),

   

It was not as simple as a just cut in half thing, I had support I needed retained and a few other things like locking tabs, then had to like cut corners for specific clearance so here is a big pile to give an idea LOL

   

I forget what the hardware store called this stuff. I saw where this was used to mount rails for the big electric bay door opener here and thought, hey that might save me from having to borrow a drill.. Did some measuring and really lucked out.. So I got this bar, cut it in half, leaving some overhang (for a reason) and bolted it up, then made a cardboard template of the chassis plate and even added a wedge to show heights of certain components (no pics..) and eventually came up with this position,

   

So the way it will work in the end, the frame/tube will be loaded, then the chassis slides in from the side (because the entire back shell of the cab removes, so this is design specific to being able to side load it),

   

Take note of all that excess? That is an arm killer to use my hack saw with.. I dooo have the right blade, I'm just mad weak sometimes lmao but that's besides the point.. That is there, because templates or not, it's possible something might come up that I didn't account for. I might need to slide the chassis to one side or the other and I don't want to lose any under side support. Dude to the curvature of the tube, I might be able to say, fit the flyback if I slide the entire thing to the right. 

So the next step will be, get some help to lift this thing up, and mount it up in the cab, make sure I opened the tabs enough to allow us tolerance to slide back and forth to hit the standoffs here, 


  standoff.png (Size: 353.21 KB / Downloads: 36)

Here, we have plenty of tolerance or wiggle room as one might call it to work with,


  anchortolerence.png (Size: 148.61 KB / Downloads: 36)

The objective of this sort of thing when you have to mod due to budget or whatever else your restriction is, is to mod the replaceable object, nothing else. So this means no drilling monitor frames, no altering the cab. Make brackets or adapters if anything. In this case, I modded this old tube's dogears and some internal plastic crap. 

This way, the day this thing actually dies, which might not even happen for another 5 to 10 years, but then we'll be in a better position to get a purpose built assembly rather then a converted home use assembly. 

So once the tube is mounted up in the cab, after a chance of it not lining up and mating properly and needing taken down a filed a little bit (it won't be much, if I didn't nail it the first time, there is a non zero chance I didn't get it), we can slide the chassis in and check it's fitment.

   

Once the chassis is fitted and if we need to make any adjustments, the tube will come out, adjustment will be made, and the hardware will be finalized. This includes cutting away excess metal, deburring anything that was drilled, keeping any cut edges rounded off, that sort of thing. 

Then the entire monitor will go back in the cab, and get hooked up to the PS2 while we wait for the System 256, which again, really excited to detail!!!!!!!! But it's saved for another post! Here is the chassis, chilling, ready to be slide in once the tube is up to the cab. 

   

Now, I'm going to be physically out of commission but I think if get three people over here and some beers, we might be able to get this all mounted up in the cab. If that's the case, this could be ready by this coming Saturday, though most likely the Saturday after. We'll see how this week goes. 

Next post is going to detail the monitor loading, a brief explanation on any adjustments for fitment because that might be useful for someone who finds themselves in our position at this point. And then, of course, how everything will be wired to it which will include it's own wiring diagram since there are some specifics I'm going to want to put in place, like additional grounding. 

I almost don't want to detail this stuff, but it might be one of those things that plants a seed on how AC stuff works, and grounding and whatnot. So that'll be in there once designed. Right now, the big thing that matters, is mechanically. Does everything get in. 

If you have one of these cabs without a monitor, and you can just get an already loaded monitor to the right frame, well. There is other info here for you. Or if you want decals recreated. Something for everyone.