pboland's Blog - Coin Doors DIY?, ThinCade: (part 2)

RSS Bot · December 12, 2018

To buy or make a coin door?

It seems simple. The easiest choice at first seems to be “buy” the coin doors. After looking at a few, the best price I found was about $30-35.00 and that was for beat up coin doors. I would still need to restore them enough to make them look good.

Then I thought, it sure would be nice to have the coin reject button be the actual “coin up” button. Meaning no tokens or quarter necessary. With that in mind I decided to make my coin doors.

Right off the bat I can tell you it cost me about $20.00 (plus my time) to make each of the four coin doors I now have.

Since I wouldn't need the internals of the coin door (since my reject button would be the "coin up") I first found a back lit arcade button that looked close to a reject button. Runs on 12 volt which I can run off of the 12 volt output of the LCD monitor. This is what I found:

Made a sticker to fit inside the face of the button to make it look like a coin reject button, spray painted the button to match my finished door color and to block some of the button surface that doesn't need to show:

Okay, reject buttons done. Now for the door itself. It still need it to look and feel like a real coin door. I don't need actual coin chutes, but I do need it to look as if it is on the door. Using a broken coin chute bezel, I made a cast of it to make copies. Again, to keep cost down I made the copies from hot glue:

The door itself is made of 1/2 inch MDF and the mounting flange is made from 1/4 inch MDF (only the door is shown):

Now, in order to make it look like a coin door I needed some raised edges. I made them with heavy card stock and computer cut them to size. Then I added the coin chute bezels:

Paint the door and added the coin reject buttons, door lock and you get this:

A couple things, no hinges will be used on these doors. Instead I will use clips. You can see the clips that I made in this picture of the backside of the coin door:

Also, I decided to only make this one door style for all of the different arcades that I plan on making. Making different coin doors seem like too much work. If I need them to be more manufacturer specific I will make a custom decal of some kind. And this is exactly what I did for my Bosconian cabinet. I added a metallic Midway Game decal to "brand" the coin door:

more to come...

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