Sideart - attaching time

Note: Before doin all this water-things described below - make sure your artwork is water-
resistant. Screen-printed sideart is - and that is what you should get from a professional
dealer. Unlaminated stuff printed on an inkjet (like from Kinko's) isn't - so if you wanna make
your own artwork, take care of that! And always ask your dealer if the water method would
work with the sideart you get - just to be on the safe side.

Luckily I got a friend who got experience in attaching big stickers (though not on arcade cabinets
before) to help me! So the one in the pictures isn't me, I'm on the other side of the digicam.
First we made some pencil-marks at the cab, so we'll find out the right position. After that, get
yourself a towel!

After cleaning my cabinet we sprayed water on the side. You can put a few drops dish in it -
note the word few, as we don't wanna have a bubble bath here!
Sounds strange, huh? Unless you don't have unlaminated particle board (where the water
would get sucked off from the wood) this is the way to go!

Just use a normal water sprayer like you would do for flowers. The whole attaching-area (and a
bit more) should be wet. We sprayed not that much on the cab - just enough that the water
won't run completey downwards. Don't forget to put the towel on the floor!
This way you can attach the the sideart more safely without getting promptly sticked - the
adhesive doesn't take any harm of this! If you would do this on a dry cab you won't be able to
move anything as soon as the adhesive side touches anything!

Stripping a small piece of the adhesive-protectionpaper off - the rough cutout is only the
overstanding area of the image, no fear!

There is only a small amount of the adhesive blank at this stage - you can freely move
the sideart on the cab until you find the right position. It just holds tight enough so it
doesn't fall down - but I would always do this things with someone in reach to help.

You can see the water running at the top. This will be squeezed out
including the wrinkles at the bottom - already had these in the original
package. Here mostly all of the backpaper is peeled of - before we start
squeezing the water out remove it completely.

Whee, this picture looks pretty fast! The tentacles are not fixed yet - and you don't need to
do it as fast as it might look here!

Now you take a squeegee - a tool to press hardly against the sideart to squeeze the water
out without doing any harm on the surface! You start to begin in the middle and then press
firmly outwards. The protection paper is still on, so this should be pretty safe.
You will see the water squeezing out at the edges! Without the water between the sideart
will stick firmly. Also this is the point where you have to squeeze out eventually some
bubbles or wrinkles - I was really surprised how mostly all of them were pressed out!

If you are done and there are still some bubbles left that you can't get out anymore just pin
a small hole at the side of the bubble -never in the middle of it! Then you can press the air
out of them. You won't notice the holes later, at least I didn't.

Stripping off is most the fun! Again, that's not me on this picture- I really should have included myself on this page!

Welcome to this world, little Centipede!

Done! And does it look awesome! (The picture turned out a bit blurry)
Now you can rub of the pencilmarks, we don't need them anymore.