Chun Li Curly Maple Arcade Fightstick
I made this Chun Li arcade stick a couple years ago after the Metroid Mother Brain arcade machine. I noticed people making arcade sticks out of exotic woods on Shoryuken.com and I figured I’d give it a try. I hadn’t built anything but a birdhouse before the Metroid and Punch-Out Cabinets but these two projects really got me going with a router and table saw. I decided I wanted to put a PRS ( Paul Reed Smith guitars) style dyed finish on an arcade stick. I searched and searched the net for info on such a finish. Here’s what I did for that finish:
First, I made the arcade stick itself, the sides are made out of curly maple. Next, I obtained Transfast Water Based ” Sapphire Blue ” dye and mixed a small amount of it with some distilled water. I sanded the curly maple exterior up to 220 grit and after that I ran a damp rag over it to “whisker” the wood. This step is key in dying most woods with water based dyes. The water raises the grain a bit creating these tiny furry whiskers of grain on the surface of the wood. I then sanded these whiskers back with 220 grit sandpaper, sanding very gently until they all but disappeared, they are hard to see, but you can feel them when you smooth your hand across the wood. I repeated this step two more times. Now, I applied the dye on the wood with a foam brush in long and somewhat slow strokes. Careful not to load the brush up with too much dye or it will run quite a bit. I dyed the wood until it was nice and even with blue. If the dye isn’t coloring the wood very well you can add more dye to the water or re-coat with more dye after the first one dries. I then let it sit overnight to dry.
The next day I took the 220 grit sandpaper and wrapped it around a small rectangle of scrap maple for a nice flat sanding surface. I gently sanded the blue dye off the maple, being careful not to sand too much leaving the dye in the grain lines. It’s usually more difficult to sand the dye out of the grain lines, that’s where it soaks in better and that is a good thing for this method.
I mixed up another batch of dye. This time I went with a little lighter shade of blue. I noticed the grain lines soaked up twice the amount of dye now, so they were nice and dark compared to the fresh wash of light blue. Curly maple dyed once will look pretty nice, but sanding back the first coat of dye while leaving some in the grain will really give that tiger stripe grain or quilt a very pronounced “3D” look when the next coat of dye goes on.
The wood looked decent once the dye was dry, but the figure really came alive with “chatoyance” or shimmer when the Polyacrylic went on. I like using Minwax Polyacrylic for a project like this, it doesn’t smell too bad and it dries clear which is perfect for colors like purple, blue, pink and green. Regular oil based Polyurethane has an amber hue but its OK with colors like dark red, brown, yellow and orange.
Once I put about 10 coats of Polyacrylic on ( 3 coats Polyacrylic = 1 coat Polyurethane ) I sanded it up the grits to about 1800. Finally I buffed the finish with (I believe it was 3M Perfect-It) car polishing compound followed by Myland’s Wax and the finish came out pretty darn good.
The joystick is a Sanwa JLF adorned with a clear Seimitsu “bubbletop” and I placed inserts of transparent arcade marquee material printed with Mandarin and symbols in the tops of the led lit buttons. I found out Chun Li means “spring,” “beautiful” and the other symbols like the blue Dragon and green Mantis on the buttons (or Chinese lanterns) signify the Xbox 360′s color coded buttons. The PCB is a hacked Xbox 360 controller hacked by the legendary Haruman in the days when I didn’t know much about soldering. The bottom of the stick is blue transparent acrylic. The Chun Li art comes from an old Playstation Magazine cover. This is probably the best arcade stick I’ve ever made. It is a bit tall since I made it for the Ultimarc buttons instead of Japanese Sanwa or Seimitsu buttons, but the stick has nice weight to it and the taller sides show off a lot more of the nicely figured curly maple.