How to make replacement badges

[Music] hello and welcome back to the 8-bit guy so in today's episode I'm going to be restoring these three disk drives now all three of these disk drives have two important things in common first of all all three of these are third-party commodore drives now what I mean by that is they're dis jobs that work with a Commodore 64 vic-20 128 etc but they weren't made by Commodore and there's a fascinating legal battle that we're gonna be talking about in the next episode but for now on this episode we're just gonna try to get these things looking good so um the second thing that is important about these drives that they share in common is that all three of them either have missing or damaged badges matches wainting got no badges yeah these two are actually completely missing badges and this one has a damaged one so I'm gonna be retro brighting possibly all three of these and and then trying to construct some brand new badges we don't need no badges and so there's different ways that we can make badges and I'm going to experiment with some different ways and we'll see what works best I don't have to show you an estate watches okay step one will be just to clean the surfaces I bought this blue chip drive on ebay a couple of years ago for one dollar and it looks like it was pulled from a landfill so uh let's try some Windex on it yeah that's cleaning up really well it looks like the top cover is less yellowed maybe the original owner left the top off while it was in use or something anyway um this one was pretty easy to clean up and I couldn't get this stuff off here so hopefully when a retro bright it that will clear up but yeah as you can see there's no badge on the front let's go ahead and disassemble the drive so we can retro bright it and I've never actually seen your design like this with these long metal screw stalks after removing the shield the thing that surprised me the most was to see a genuine moss chip in there I mean this was a third party product that Commodore was furious about so where did they get this Moss chip from anyway let's go ahead remove the board [Music] not all these screws are the same so I'm definitely keeping them organized now let's remove this front lever now wow this is also neat they have a metal piece in the lever for additional strength I wasn't expecting to see that moving along let's get this front bezel off time to retro Brite I was going to use my usual crate but being this in December hits the Christmas decoration you're seeing even at solar noon with the Sun at its highest point it's still coming in from the south this time of year and my crate is just too tall so I'm gonna try these smaller clear crates and I'll start by rinsing off some of the dirt inside and even though we have sunlight it's about 50 degrees outside right now so I don't know how long this process is going to take hopefully no more than two days I'm going to set a timer on my watch to remind me to come out and check on this every 30 minutes to make sure nothing is floated to the top or anything while waiting on the retro Brite let's move over to the accelerator plus this one's in pretty good shape already I think the front faceplate may need a little retro bright but the main concern is the condition and wacky placement of the badge and here is the enhancer mm the one I think will need the most work and it's a little bit grungy so let's get that part cleaned up [Music] [Music] [Music] and now let's turn our attention to the leftover adhesive I'm killing this wd-40 sit for 10-15 minutes and then we'll try removing it okay so 10 minutes is passed and some of the adhesive came off but not much so let's try something different okay so it has been suggested to me that I use a plastic razor blade like this instead of a screwdriver and that hopefully that will prevent more scratching to the surface unfortunately with the layout of this I can't really go like this because it's recessed but hopefully maybe I can work on it like this some bits of it were coming off but I started to get the impression I was dealing with more than one problem here I even tried lightly scraping with a screwdriver but ultimately no more adhesive came off I think what we have here is two different kinds of adhesive I think one of them was superglue or something with acetone in it that could melt plastic and so I think the original label had one kind of glue and eventually fell off and then the previous owner tried to glue it back on with a different he Civ and that's the only explanation I can come up with but being that I need this surface to be somewhat smooth I'm going to use a sharp screwdriver and try to scrape the plastic smooth so in this case I'm purposely pressing down really hard to chisel away the melted part of the plastic on the bright side once we get a badge made for it you won't see any of the scratches I'm making but the smoother surface will help it adhere properly and now I'm done and it may not look so great but when I run my fingers across I can feel that it's considerably smoother than it was before however this does bring up another question I'm not sure this needs retro brightening after all this scraped area should definitely be the original color and I can't see much difference so how to make a badge just as a recap I made a new badge for the IBM PC jr. that I restored a while back and the way I did that was I designed a new label in a paint program and then I printed it out on my label maker using a special black on clear label and then I used a piece of aluminum tape and cut out a square to fit the recessed area and then I applied the label to the aluminum tape and ended up with the a decent-looking badge it wasn't perfect but it would certainly pass a casual inspection of the PC Junior keyboard in fact here it is compared to the original IBM label on the computer so this is one option we can use for making badges that are monochrome but the enhancer mm has color in the logo my first goal was to design a new badge and all I had to go on were some of these photos that I found online of the enhancer mm and while I didn't take any video capture of the design process on this one this is what I came up with it took me almost two hours to design this trying to match every part of the font and all of the proportions exactly and still not a hundred percent perfect but I think it's close enough and I took a trip over to my brother's house you may know him as Mike from the geek pub and he has a shop with just about every tool imaginable in fact she's almost done fabricating his own r2d2 and I thought maybe he could help me create a metal plated badge and we did look at several options including this very thin aluminum we even talked about cutting up a soda can and making the backing out of that though one problem was however other recessed area on the enhancer mm is not as deep as you'd think not like a common or products for example so we eventually decided to go another route which turned out to be much easier first he measured the height and width of the recessed area and then he took my artwork into Photoshop and set everything for the correct size and then he printed it on one of those little photo printers the technology behind these is actually fascinating and someday I'd like to do a video on how these things actually work anyway needless to say they don't use ink or toner like a traditional printer anyway um there we go that looks pretty good and um then he just used a razor knife to cut it out and then we did a little test fit and we need to trim the corners bit but otherwise it fits perfectly XE is some 3m spray adhesive and let that sit for 30 seconds [Music] and there we go it actually looks fantastic but it's probably not as durable as the original badge but it should hold up for the documentary I'm going to be using it for in a few weeks moving over to the accelerator plus for a moment I'm going to start by measuring the label which by the way was 47 by 12 millimeters and typically I want the image size to be 10 pixels per millimeter so that's 470 by 120 pixels now this time I stored my work every few minutes so you can sort of see the process for how I made this I started by figuring out the exact area where the logo went and then also marking off the area where each letter would go then I started working on the letter E which by the way was used three times and the logo so I can just copy it and then some letters can be modified from another letter without redrawing the whole thing from scratch and there it is the finished logo and this one took about an hour to do and now I'll just print it out on my label maker I'll use the common black on white labels for testing and now I'll compare with the original label I think it's a pretty close match now I predict some people will likely be saying I didn't use enough resolution on the image so to prove why this is wrong I actually spent some time and modified the image with the resolution doubled in both directions and sure on-screen here it looks a lot better but how does the new print compared with the old print to the naked eye they look exactly the same but what if we put them under the microscope this should be very telling so here's the first version and now here's the high-res version the pixel pattern is a bit different due to the way the image was processed by the label maker software but there's no real difference and that's because the resolution of these label makers isn't all that great but still to the naked eye this thing is so small nobody's really going to notice so what I'm gonna do now is use this black on clear cartridge in my label maker and I'm going to essentially do this just like the PCG jej I made a while back so I'll cut out a piece of this aluminum tape preferably in a spot without any dents and then as you can see that peel the backing off this it's a clear label so I'll just put this down in the middle of the aluminum tape and of course cut off the excess and so here's my new label as compared to the old it's not perfect but I think it'll pass now I can peel the old label off and one thing I noticed right away is that the color of the plastic is different under the label you know what that means right yep I need to retro right the faceplate so let's take this thing apart - it's actually pretty easy to take apart well this thing is really compact inside as compared to a 1541 there are just two screws holding the faceplate on however I had some trouble removing the front lever and it was really stuck I'm good and then later I realized there's actually a screw holding it on and I've honestly never seen it designed before now once I remove this group came off easily also the LED appears to be glued in place so the only way to truly remove the faceplate is to unplug the LED which means cutting this simple time and I'll just put this right alongside the blue-chip parts which are now on their second day in the Sun and I'm not convinced this is going to be enough so I came back out around sunset on the second day it's time to see if this is gonna work as I'm rinsing them off I can tell some pieces look better but others not so much okay so how are the results well this is the top piece and it already looked pretty good anyway so the top piece is perfect I mean it's ya can't complain there the back piece actually looks great no complaints there and death was not that great before now the bottom looks actually really good because there was a bunch of weird discoloration before so that looks good but the sides on the bottom are still yellowed on both sides so that's a problem the worst part is the front faceplate it's I mean it's a little better no doubt but it's just it's not as good as I wanted it to be and the handle is fine now this is for the the other drive and unfortunately I don't think there's any difference at all if there is it's just just mild improvement okay so the main problem is it's just too cold outside I think that if this had been summertime these these would already be looking fantastic but I'm still convinced that if I were to leave them out there another two or three days even with the cold weather they would still look pretty good the main problem is I don't have another three or four days because starting tomorrow is supposed to be overcast and getting even colder for the next week or so so that being the case I'm gonna have to move to another method I tried putting some of the smaller pieces on the stove like I've done before and somehow I lost all of the footage of doing that okay so I cook these for several hours and to be honest I am just not happy with how they came out of fact in many ways I think this one looks worse than it did it's just a little bit splotchy so I have been forced to seek an alternative method and I picked up this blacklight today for like five bucks it was literally the only one I could find for sale I mean I could order something way better online but I don't have time for that because this is kind of a rush so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna stick that in here and well let's just see what we come up it I'm going to take this aluminum tape and line the inside of this bucket to help keep in as much of the UV light as possible and reflect it back at all angles keep in mind this an experiment I have no idea if this adhesive will even hold up in submerged water I mean this stuff is meant for outdoor use so I would hope it will hold up but we'll see also the backlight I have is incandescent which really produces very little UV compared to a fluorescent or LED style backlight but I'll have to make do with it for the moment let's go ahead and screw that in there I'm gonna add some weight to these pieces to keep them from floating to the top yeah I think that'll work that means I can let this sit overnight without worrying about it and now I'll just add some hot water from the sink and of course some high-strength hydrogen peroxide and last I'm gonna add in some extra foil to keep it all the UV and heat from that incandescent bulb I let that sit for a few hours but when I went out for my walk I went to the mall since it was cold outside and I remembered that Spencer sells black lights too so I went in there and I found this nice fluorescent bulb these things actually output tremendously more UV light than an incandescent bulb uh since fluorescent lights actually only produce UV light and the typical coating on the inside of the glass converts it to visible light hence why they're called florescent lights now this one just lacks the coding to convert the light and so um I'll just let this sit overnight like this so another 24 hours has passed and I'm gonna check on the progress I can I can definitely see improvement already but I'll need to remove it and dry it off be sure subjectively it looks much better but I need an objective way to measure it so let's compare it with the other plastic piece looks like the top is a good match but you can still see some yellow on the side so this piece will need another day however the faceplate for the other drive looks about as good as it's going to get I can no longer see the bright spot under where the label was so I'm going to work on the bottom piece of the blue chip Drive now I've attached a weight to it as well to keep it submerged switching gears a bit I've reassembled the accelerator plus Drive and it's looking great now on the rear here was some permanent marker where somebody had labeled these ports and apparently I forgot to take video of that but I did clean all of that off and I don't think they were labeled from the factory originally but what I've decided to do is make a nice looking label for these ports so um yeah I think that will be a nice addition and probably what they should have done from the factory now let's put on the front badge which is what this video was supposed to be all about before we got sidetracked with retro writing and there we go I think that looks great and I bet nobody but a very knowledgeable collector would ever spot this as not original so yeah I'm very happy with the outcome of this Drive so back to the blue chip drive for a moment it appears the retro bright process damaged the coding on what was left of this badge I tried to scrape the rest off so we could just have a solid metal finish but end up scratching a crap out of it so I've just decided to remove what is left of this badge and being this one was missing most of the badge to begin with I feel I can hardly make this thing worse and so here's the new label I printed out again designed all by hand based on a photo I found over the internet which you can see here so after cutting it to the correct size I can peel off the backing and you can see it's white text on a clear label and so I'll just apply that down here and there we go I think that looks pretty good definitely better than it was before okay so believe it or not four days have now passed each day this gets a little better but it's slow going and honestly I just can't wait any so however this looks today is going to be it for now the best way to see how this is gonna look is to stick the pieces together well this is a little disappointing and well it looks better than it did originally the pieces still don't match now how did the aluminum tape hold up well not that great as you can see the tape has peeled off in many places and what's even more interesting is after I remove the water there's all this residue all over the tape and I'm not sure if this is tape adhesive or aluminum oxide in fact I wonder if this was using up all the hydrogen peroxide but reacting with this stuff instead of the plastic so I think the tape was a big mistake well let's go ahead and reassemble the drive and here we are everything actually looks pretty good except for those two side areas that I just couldn't get to whiten any so overall I think this project was a success I'm happy with the enhancer mm also very happy with the accelerator plus and the blue chip well I'm not thrilled with it but it'll have to do I think it's important to show the failures along with the successes that way we can all learn from my mistakes but um I think in the next couple of months I'm going to invest some time to build a proper indoor retro brining contraption based on some of the experience I gained using this little makeshift thing as well as some other YouTube videos I've watched where they had a little bit more success and one of the things that I've wondered about is if you VA is really the right way to go I mean that's what these bulbs that's what they emit but I'm often wondered if you VB or UVC might actually work better for this process unfortunately both are dangerous to work with but I think I can build a contraption to use them safely so I think I'm gonna do some experiments on that next and we'll see how that works and the other thing I wanted to do was experiment with a soda blaster so I hope to do both of those things sometime in this coming year other than that this this video was supposed to be about rebadging and I think that I successfully rebadged all three of these I mean could have been better but I think it worked out pretty well but that's it for the moment so stick around for the next episode and thanks for watching [Music]

Channel: The 8-Bit Guy

Views: 383,310

Rating: 4.9245572 out of 5

Keywords: badge, vintage, fabricate, label, make, generate, retro, computer, disk, drive, commodore, apple, atari, build, design, repair, restore

Id: pYeIr1fPHHU

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 09 2019