"The Black Knight Rises" - Week 2 Progress

Week 2 was more challenging than the first, and as some tasks took longer than anticipated, my goal of readying The Black Knight Rises for the 2017 Southern Fried Gameroom Expo begins to slip away.


Day 8 - Saturday:
Troy arrived early and we set off to sawing some wood.  Previously I had hoped to use my 3' x 6' Shapeoko 2 DIY XL CNC router to cut the cabinet.  Unfortunately, over the past half year I've had nothing but issues from my CNC, ranging from bad power supplies to sloppy belts and uncontrollable backlash.  I simply couldn't trust the CNC router for this job.

Especially since I was using expensive walnut.  No paint for this build.

Troy and I spent all day, and got the cabinet sides cut out, and the backbox sides planed and cut out.  The backbox was being fabricated from solid walnut, since the cut sides would expose plywood, and since it was about 7/8" thick, it had to be planed down to 3/4".  For the cabinet I used 3/4" walnut plywood.

Setting up the mobile woodshop in the driveway.

Read on for the day by day recap...



Day 9 - Sunday:
With my new playfield inserts in hand, I popped the first one in.  It slid in easy and landed flush.  Wow, I didn't know why I had dreaded this task, I thought there would have been hours of sanding.

What I didn't know is I had just hit a home-run my very first time at bat, making it seem easy to hit home-runs pitch after pitch.  The rest of the inserts put up a fight, especially the blue triangles which seemed to have an extra lip on them.  Some inserts needed only 10 minutes of sanding, others needed more than an hour.  With 51 inserts to install, this was going to take more than one day.

Day 10 - Monday:
More insert sanding. Finished the lower playfield.

My fingers hurt.  This sucks.  Hope it is worth it.

I then applied plastic primer to the inserts, and epoxied them in with Gorilla Glue 2-part epoxy in the clear color.

The new inserts really pop with color.

I test assembled the cabinet to make sure everything fit as expected, and to make measurements for a few additional pieces that needed to be cut.


Day 11 - Tuesday:
Troy returns for a bit to help with the sanding.  We get the upper playfield knocked out, and the inserts epoxied in place.

Troy also took a to-go box with a homework assignment - he would be rebuilding the three Williams drop targets.  Included in the box were new springs and coils.


Day 12 - Wednesday:  
I wet sanded the playfields one more time with 600 grit sandpaper and alcohol.  Then I set about painting touch-ups on the playfields.  Finally, I used a set of Black Knight insert decals to "redraw" the lines around the inserts and add the missing text.  I was really disappointed in the decals, both because they were very thick, and because some of the circle sizes were completely wrong.  Plus one of the Extra Ball triangles was simply missing.

Ultimately, what I ended up doing for the larger circles is using some of the circle decals as a painting template, and hand painted a new circle around the decal.  Then  by removing the decal, I had a nicely formed painted circle left behind.  I also hand trimmed every decal with an exacto knife, removing the clear areas inside circles and around text.

VID1900's tutorial recommended using water slide decals, self printed with your own artwork.  They are much thinner, plus you can get the artwork perfect. I certainly didn't have time for this project to design my own decals, but I would highly recommend water slide decals over the store bought die cut decals.


Day 13 - Thursday:
Though the playfields were now ready for clear coating, I decided to hold off a day.  While it was sunny and warm, winds were gusting to 20 mph.  Since I would be painting outdoors, wind would be a problem.  Friday promised to be warm and sunny with 5mph winds.

Though I had plenty of ChameLEDs on hand that I had made a couple years earlier, I only had white and RGB ChameLEDs.  For all the inserts on Black Knight, I felt it best to use dedicated Red, Green or Blue LED's.  With a fresh batch of colored LED's and the appropriate resistors just delivered, I set about making 48 new LED's.

I used a stencil and squeegee to apply solder paste to the PCB boards, and my manual pick and place machine to place the LED's and resistors on the PCB's.  I then baked them for a few minutes in my home-built reflow oven, and was happy when every last LED tested perfectly.

A fresh batch of ChameLED's, assembled and ready for baking.

An interesting feature of my ChameLEDs is that they can either be snapped apart to make small individual boards, or left connected together.  If they are left connected, you can actually attach all the wires to just one end, and power flows down through the remaining sub-boards.

 I also decided to test out the wood finish on some scrap walnut.  After much research, I had settled on Danish Oil to get the color I desired.  Though sometimes real life doesn't mimic what you see on the internet, the Danish Oil went on like magic!

Walnut plywood and solid walnut, both before and after applying Danish Oil in the natural color.  Amazing.

Day 14 - Friday:

Ready for clear coating.

 
With accommodating weather, I got both playfields clear coated before noon.  I used Omni MC161 automotive urethane, and was very pleased with the results.  A few spots came out a bit rough, partly because of the underlying playfield had cracks and defects that transmitted right through the clear.  Also, the insert decals were very visible to the eye, especially when looking from a low angle - another reason to use water slide decals instead.  But overall, most of the playfield looked like it had a solid sheet of glass resting on top.

Between coats and while drying, I protected the playfields from dust and bugs with a makeshift cover.

With my previous day's success baking up a batch of ChameLEDs, I set about assembling a Chameleon IO Controller.  This is a much harder task, primarily because the size of the components are so small, and the integrated circuits have very tiny and closely spaces electrical pads.

Unfortunately, my cheapo manual stencil printer wasn't set up correctly, a couple bolts were loose and I didn't notice.  This causes the stencil to shift while I was applying paste, and while most of the paste looked great, one area of the board had paste all smeared together, and I didn't notice until I was mostly done placing components on the PCB.  I finished up placing components and set about baking it in the reflow oven, but my expectations were met when it came out of the oven with bridged solder joints.

My Chameleon IO Controller is designed to be assembled by machine, and I'm really only asking for trouble trying to do this by hand.  If I can bring it to market I will definitely have them machine assembled, but for now I will continue to do this by hand.

4 hours wasted.  I will try again another day.


Week 2 Complete - 2 Weeks Remaining:
At the end of the second week, the playfield has been restored and clear coated.  I will let it cure a few days before giving it a rubdown with compound and starting the reassembly.

I also had a fresh batch of ChameLEDs ready for installation.

Most of the wood for the cabinet and backbox had been cut, but quite a bit more still needed to be fabricated before glue-up could begin.

Cabinet fabrication and playfield restoration were both taking significantly longer than I had allocated.  And with the failed attempt to assemble a Chameleon IO Controller, I am more worried than ever that The Black Knight Rises won't rise before The Southern Fried Gameroom Expo.