The Coin Door

The coin door is the only piece of a Donkey Kong cabinet that you can’t buy easily. Keep this in mind if you are thinking of building one.

Getting a coin door is a big deal. Screen’s entire Donkey Kong build starts with "Finally I've found a Nintendo Coin Door." Ron finished his machine without any coin door because he couldn’t find one in time.

When I started this project I couldn’t find a Nintendo coin door anywhere online, so my plan was to buy a 12 x 18 drywall access door and cut some holes in it to make my own coin door. Then the arcade gods smiled upon me and I won one on ebay. I don’t want to admit how much I was willing to pay, but luckily I won it for 30 bucks.

For the past few weeks, the entire project has been on hold while I’ve been waiting to get this in the mail. When I got it, I discovered that it had some pry marks where someone tried to pry it open at one point. Totally awesome. At least there will be one authentic piece to my lame-ass cabinet.

I threw some chemical stripper on it and scraped it off ten minutes later. Then I hit it with the wire attachment for my drill. A few coats of spray paint and it will look good as new.


(As a side note, the wire brush drill attachment wasn't in the "drill bit" section of Home Depot, it was in the "sanding pads and disks" area which drove me fucking crazy.)


And because I couldn’t find them online, the measurements for the legendary Nintendo Coin Door are:

Outside total width: 31 cm
Outside total height: 46.5 cm
Door only width: 26.7 cm
Door only height: 42.3