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Step by Step - Taking Apart

     CHRO-MAME was designed from the ground up to be easily assembled/disassembled an unlimited number of times.  This was to allow me to design it without having to worry about it fitting through doorways (it doesn't), having to lug the entire thing up and down stairs (it must weigh over 300 pounds), and without having to rent a moving truck to move it (no way this is fitting in even the largest of SUV's).

     Solution?  I devised an L-brace, wood-insert, and bolt system.  The entire cabinet is held together with L-braces, bolts, and metal wood inserts (these inserts contain the threads for the bolts).  This tripled the amount of time it took me to work on this cabinet.  I had to align, drill, and glue in about 350 wood inserts.  Worse of all, many of them did not align perfectly, requiring me to manually enlarge the holes on all of the L-braces.  This took CONSIDERABLE time to do.  If I simply nailed the thing together it would have taken me 4 months to finish, not 12.

     Taking the entire thing apart is easier than putting it back together.  It will take me about 2-3 hours to take it apart, and 3-4 hours to put it back together.  It takes longer to put together mainly due to the fact that I have to align all of the L-braces and wood inserts accordingly.  Leaving the L-braces on some of the panels makes it much easier to reassemble (things are practically aligned already).  I went overkill on the number of L-braces I used to make it extra strong.  Trust me, you couldn't tell the difference if it was nailed and glued together.

     The wood inserts I bought were very hard to find.  Home Depot had a few, but they were too large and too expensive ($3 or $4 for 5 or 6 of them).  As stated before, I used about 350.  The Woodworkers Warehouse (out of business as of December, 2003) had a bag filled with 50 wood inserts and 50 bolts (bolts too large to use) for $20.  The bolts got tossed and the wood inserts saved the day.  Since then I haven't seen a single store that sells these wood inserts for so cheap.  They probably cost less than $0.01 each to make, but nobody carries them.  It's highly probable that they can be found online cheap.

Step 1 - Control Panel and Monitor Bezel Removed:

Step 2 - Monitor Removed:

Step 3 - Monitor Table and Coin Door Panel Removed:

Step 4 - Speaker Panel and Marquee Removed:

Step 5 - Roof Removed:

Step 6 - Remaining Panels Separated:

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