A Gift for a Seven Year Old - Painted PS2
So my friend's little brother turned seven on December 5th, and I wanted to give him something special without breaking the bank. His family lives in a trailer and consists of two older sisters and his Mom who works full time at Meijer barely keeping the roof over their heads. His father had just walked out of the house and left him about a month ago and he is hiding any sorrow very well. Yeah, the kid is tough, but is still a kid nonetheless. Considering his Mother could not afford much this year, I decided to soft mod his PS2 for him so he could play some of his favorite games without the discs. It has been about 4 years since I did anything with a PS2, so I was surprised to discover FMCB, which has come far from the old MC exploits. Of course, it took me about 4 hours to get it working due to having a non-compatible flash drive, but I finished it.
He only had one controller and its up button did not work, so I bought him three more, a multitap, network adapter, eyetoy, and provided my own flash drive and hard drive for the boot, oh, and paint, totaling $45.
No need to talk much about the boot, I just got him a couple games, put SEGA, Nintendo, and SNES on it and customized the menu to say 'Bareck's Games', which is his name, and made them green. The real feat in my opinion was painting the case, which he could care less about.
I had planned to write his name on it, but failed and decided to go the easy route and make lines with some striping tape. I only had about 40 minutes to tape it so I had no chance at making any cool design with no experience under my belt.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0097.jpg
I then used fluorescent green paint to coat the PS2, network adapter, and the controller ends (so he knows which are his when playing with friends).
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0100.jpg
The end result was fine, but after so many coats, the paint felt like tape so I decided to put a clear coat over it to smooth it out and protect it from flaking off. This part scared me as I had NEVER used canned clear and I was painting in 30 degree weather. I put a first coat on and it looked great going on, but after three minutes, it was doing something weird and became bubbled in a way. I crossed my fingers, put on more coat, and went to bed. This was the result in the morning.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0103.jpg
It says to let it dry in normal temperatures for around 24 hours to avoid finger printing, but I did not have the time and had to put it together at 20 hours in. As I was putting it together, without knowing, I left a large thumb print on the side, but it still looked okay.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0113.jpg
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0114.jpg
This is the END result. I was kind of upset that I ran out of tape and was unable to stripe the network adapter and tape off the memory cards and multitap, but the 7 year old could care less.
http://i59.photobucket.com/albums/g3...a/SAM_0117.jpg
The end all was fine, I just wish I would have had more time. Of course, I was the one that decided to paint the thing the day before his birthday... Haha, well, if anyone ever attempts this, just remember to let it dry for a LONG time after sealing it with gloss. Oh, and have fun doing it, I know it did.
-Cody T.
Also! The stripes are on both the front and the back and it was painted to be a stand up PS2 and my mind did not think that a 7 year old would be better off with it laying on its side, but whatever, it is still a nice looking piece of machine.