Elevator Action Project Update

I’m pretty excited about how the Elevator Action project is coming along (a harbor during the storm). I’ve only done one other stencil before this, my first real project Scramble, and I must say working with stencils on these machines is pretty fun, it’s like grown-up art class. I use a fine paint roller, so my work is never going to be perfect compared to the compressor kids, but it’s close enough to fool some. Anyway, on with the picture show.
The original cabinet was the green on green Taito classic that housed Jungle Hunt and Jungle King, and folks on KLOV note many Elevator Action cabinets lived in this colored cabinet given they were designed to be interchangeable for games—so purity and originality, as always, is a slippery slope. That said, this color guide I found on Flickr for classic Taito machines tries to match color combos with games, and I love it:

Just Brian’s Classic Taito Color Guide

You’ll notice Elevator Action and Wild Western have all but identical color schemes, and Tin Star and Frontline are pretty darn close. So, I designed to start from scratch and prime over the original Jungle Hunt/King cabinet after water damage repair.

Original Jungle Hunt cabinet I got Elevator Action with

Cabinet repaired and primed, you can just make up the original art

After Alberto did his work, highlighted above, I had a clean slate to work with, but the issue was I had no definite color match. I looked high and low online, but did not get any solid color codes for the original Elevator Action, so Antonella and I went to the local professional paint store with some images of an original Elevator Action machine and studied. The guy who worked there was super helpful, and we decided on a rosy brown for the base, which you can see below:

I wasn’t sure it was a perfect match, so when I started masking for the first side of stencil work, it was with some trepidation.

But I committed, and it was gorgeous, fearing the dark orangish brown for the Taito design was too orange, I once again hep my breath, but….

…it was beautiful!

I’m sure it is not “exact” and using a roller left some clean-up work, but the cabinet is absolutely gorgeous, another off-the-line game in the bavacade.

And to double-down, I had brought back a reproduction of the metal base of the control panel, and picked up a new version of the control panel overlay art. Some might say, “why?” Well, because the one the existing one was not only a reproduction, but it was a crappy one. Take a look at the following two images, the first is the control panel overlay art that I have now, the second the one I will be applying to the new control panel to make it more perfect in every way:

Crappy control panel reproduction I was saddled with

New control panel art with so much more detail

So the new control panel art is exciting, and given both the bezel and the marquee are the original glass, this game is the shiznit.