Tuesday, July 5, 2016

C64 repaint

After a few weeks of silence - pun intended, the previous posts were about music - I'm back with a completely different topic of renovating retro computers.

I've posted a few pictures about a C64 C months ago in this post: C64 C - I'm blue, I'm blue!
Since then I made progress with renovating the scratched case and decided to try out something new: repaint and make it unique.

Started with a warm bubble bath - no, not me, I washed the plastic case in a warm, soapy bubble bath then let it dry out. Some very fine sandpaper helped to soften the scratches, tho it wasn't enough to completely remove them. Well, my patience was over as well, so I went online to check available spray paints.

Went with a very simple grey colored spray can, he only criteria was to be able to paint plastic with it. The whole C64 case was a wreck already so I had nothing to lose - I thought.

Bubble bath followed the sandpapering session, had to clean it before painting. Then, two layers of spray painting has been applied, including 2 days of drying between the 2 layers.


After the second layer of grey paint I left it on the balcony, fortunately there was no rain, only calm wind that helped with drying.


Grey base. Well, looks better than the original, scratchy surface but it's still not enough. What to do, what to do..? Add colors! And add some well-known game characters.

It seemed to be a great idea but wasn't easy to realize it. It's not easy to draw without any talent... Anyway, I had to try it.

And failed. So I repainted the whole thing with grey again.

And then asked my wife if she wants to help me with drawing and she did offer her help! I'm a lucky man.

We chose a few classic games like Bruce Lee, Pacman, Space Invaders, Inter Karate and printed the characters on an A4 paper (thanks to Poison for helping with setting up the proper size).



It took a few hours to properly draw and fill the characters but I think it worth the effort.
They looked really cool but overall, it was just a few black characters on a grey plastic so we decided to fill 'em up with some colors.


Looks a bit abstract, right? Yeah, it's not _that_ great as I had it in my vision but it's still looking good and what's important: it's unique and it's the first one. The next one will be better, because I won't stop here. You've been warned.



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Today's music: BRUCE LEE (1984) - LukHash REMIX (performed by Kung Foo Panda)