Almost Complete

So this weekend, in spite of all the holiday responsibilities, I managed to almost wrap up this project.  The new High Score Save kit arrived from Braze Technologies.  A fancy new back door was finely crafted and painted, with a proper cam lock.  This time the door actually fit, amazingly enough, I guess I'm getting better at the wood working.  Of course I couldn't be bothered to snap a picture of it, who wants to see a video game cabinet backdoor anyway. 

The control panel was hastily painted and the t-molding applied to the front edge.  All the controls were re-assembled and cleaned.  New buttons will need to be purchased and installed, cause I'm just not happy with these anymore, too many cigarette burns and they're just too stained and nasty.  But the control panel looks nice and here you can see Mario in his white overalls.  Maybe in this early stage Mario had not yet achieved his lifelong dream of becoming a plumber.  Judging by his attire, I would say he was perhaps in the painting business.

I ordered the new cpo and bezel instruction cards from Arcade shop.  These small things really dress up the cabinet ( and distract you from my shoddy paint job).  The lower marquee bracket was replaced with a nice new one from arcade shop also. 

It's difficult to see in these photos but the bezel has a nasty scratch right down the center.  A whole lot of scrubbing with novus #3 and #2 and it looks much better, but still somewhat noticeable.

Lastly I wired up the coin-mechs,  although they are basically useless and unnecessary, they're working perfectly.  Now a coin box/drawer will need to be located as mine is missing, and the coins just fall into the bottom of the cabinet.  I'll likely just make a small box to do the job.

Anyway, it was a bit of a rush, and I would've done a much better job with this, but with everything going on this time of year, I 'm happy just to have the thing back together and ready for any and all hapless holiday visitors.

Board repair

There is a common problem with Pole Position.  They don't work.  To own a working Pole Position, from what I can tell, is a small miracle.  I don't know a whole lot about electronics or the theory behind it, but it would seem the boards have a design flaw that caused the +5 contacts at the finger board and connector to overheat and burn up.  Secondly, in order to save the high scores, and I guess to save money at the time, the manufacturer opted to solder a battery directly to the main circuit board.  We all know that these games were never meant to last 25 or 30 years, but you can guess what happened, battery acid leaked out and destroyed many of the boards.  This one was no exception.  Asking around on the KLOV forum got me the e-mail address of a Dick Millican (causeddmillikan@juno.com ) in Washington that specializes in repairing the Pole Position boards.  He was very reasonable and had the board repaired and back in about a week.

Naturally when the boards came back I was excited to plug it in and go.  Sadly I was presented with this lame display on the monitor.  So my first thought was that I had done something wrong on the earlier monitor work.  After swapping out the original Matsushita monitor for a known working one, I still had this nasty dark and wavy display.  I put the original monitor back in, played with the connectors for a bit and the picture seemed to clear up for a moment.  Having heard all the talk about faulty connectors I decided to re-pin the edge connectors and see what happened.  Well it worked.

This was more like it.  Although the colors are a bit off.  The picture was looking good. 

I added a few credits and was happy to see that the game played and sounded perfect. 

With the back door closed, the inside of the cabinet got really hot in a hurry.  So I installed a 4 inch 12 volt fan into the back of the cab and wired it up.

This game is a blast to play.  The sound when you're sitting in the cockpit and racing are enough to put a smile on any ones face.
There are still some issues to be resolved.  On some days, when I turn it on, I just get garbage on the screen.  I then have to turn it off.  Move the filter board or connectors around a little, and then turn it on again.  Usually it starts up after this and works fine for the rest of the day.  Also the colors need adjusted, but that is best done by switching the game to service mode and using the color chart.  Right now there is something wrong with the service switch, so it will need to be replaced first.

Control Panel Work

My original plan was to have a go at restoring the control panel with some Bondo.  After a closer look at it and removing the plexi overlay, I decided to try and reproduce the panel from scratch. 

Another trip to Lowes and I was ready to have a go at it.  As typical, I was able to find (almost) what I needed.  The only 5/8 material they had was a piece of particle board shelving material, not likely to last long but worth a go for now.  I can always make another one if it doesn't work out.  There are several areas on the control panel that had to be routed out for the back edge and the joystick mount.  Rather than attempt to do this work with my fixed base router, I opted for a router attachment for my Dremel tool.  It worked perfectly, It was a little slower than using a full sized router, but much easier to handle and perfect for small projects like this one.

Here you can see I'm routing out the back edge that fits into the back support.  It is only an 1/8 of an inch smaller and runs across the entire back length.  So I used a strait bit, and clamped a guide for the router along the length of the panel.  I then had to work through and remove the remaining outside material.  When I was finished I had a perfectly smooth stair step look that I then test fitted in the back support. 

I don't have a picture of it here but the original control panel has a rectangular recessed area on both sides for the joystick to mount into.  It was a little more difficult to do, but not hard and took only about 15 minutes to knock out.

After that I used the original panel to mark off where the buttons would need to be mounted, and used a forstner bit I had from a previous project to drill those out.  Naturally they were a bit off from the original which had me worried.  So I grabbed the control panel overlay and the buttons and test fitted
the whole thing.  Since the buttons holes were slightly

larger than the buttons it had enough play in the layout to get the alignment correct.  Here's a picture I took while test fitting.  Now all I have left to do is route out the slot along the front for the t-molding and drill out each of the mounting holes for the 8 carriage bolts that hold the overlay on.  Then I'll give this a good coat of paint followed by a coat of Polycrylic and hope for the best.

A little work between Christmas parties

So let's see, I managed to do almost nothing on this project today.  I masked off the orange areas of the kick panel and painted the black on each inside portion.  After that I attempted to paint the slots on the inside of the speaker grill by masking them off with tape and hitting them from the inside with some black spray paint. Well that turned out to be a big fat FAIL.  The paint ran down the back side of the tape and ruined the orange paint.  So that had to be repainted, and didn't quite look right after that.

Now to the t-molding. I needed to do something that I couldn't screw up.  I was blown away at how good the cabinet looked after installing the new bright white t-molding.  So I mounted the freshly painted coin door and took a few pics.  Not bad, I'm starting to think this is going to look pretty good when I'm finished.

Oh and Scott Brasington was having a holiday sale on all his high score save kits over at www.brasington.org/arcade, or Braze Technologies.  So I ordered the High Score Kit for DK jr.

Pizza Joint Memories

There is a bit of a story with this Asteroids cocktail.  I found a listing for it on Craigslist in Sarasota. The owner claimed it was working recently and just needed some tweaking to get the monitor working again, wow what an understatement. He then said that he'd rather get it fixed and keep it than sell it, and that he had it and another game called Sinistar that he'd like to get fixed.  Somehow between emailing back and forth for three or four weeks, he got around to offering me the Asteroids if I would drive down and repair the monitor in his Sinistar.  Not a bad deal I figured.  Not that I'm an expert at monitors or anything, but he did send a few pics showing what it was doing, and I consulted the legendary Bob Roberts.  So I ordered the cap kit for his Wells Gardner and a couple of transistors for the deflection board and headed down there on a Saturday. 

His monitor repair went off without a hitch.  I did the work right there off the back of my sister's truck and had the Sinistar working in about an hour.  He was totally stoked after that, and Started playing Sinistar almost immediately. I was just glad everything worked out, since it was about a two hour drive from my place, and a wasted trip would've sucked.  Well long story short I got the Asteroids, and he tossed in a non-working Playchoice 10 also, for the price of a cap kit, a few transistors and a little of my time.

Now for the fun part.  This thing is nasty.  Not to say that its in bad shape, it looks worse than it actually is. If not for the rope tied around it though, I think the cabinet would've fallen apart on the ride back. I've restored two cocktail cabinets thus far and both cleaned up real well.  So I was confident that I could bring this one back to life.
My biggest concern was getting the monitor working again.  It came with a 15" Electrohome G05-805. I have a working Asteroids upright so testing the board and monitor against that working system will be a big advantage.  First thing I did was test the board from the cocktail in my working cabinet.  Sadly it was not working, or not working very well. Testing the 15" monitor with the video signal from my working game produced equally disappointing results.  So chalk it up, bad monitor, bad game board, bad cabinet, nasty power supply and voltage regulator board.  Quite a project.

I started by ordering the usual parts:
New "big blue" capacitor
New fuse block and fuses
new power cord
overhaul kit for the Audio/Voltage Regulator board
cap kit  with transistors for G05-805 xy monitor

These to me are the basics. Once I get a solid power supply and correct voltages on a machine, I usually feel like I'm halfway along.
Normally I wait until the game is working properly to do any cosmetic work.  In this case I had to make an exception.  As I said earlier the cabinet was at risk of falling completely apart if not moved carefully.  So I stripped most of the hardware out and vacuumed the 30+ years of dust and rodent fecal matter out of the cab.  The base of the cabinet had been pulled loose from the top and sides.  So a little wood glue, a few drywall screws and my giant clamps held overnight and it was solid as new.

As I'm writing this, I can't actually recall what came next.  I believe I struggled with the monitor for a week or more,  I eventually caved and took it to our local expert Atari Jim.  He went over it and found a capacitor that I had soldered in with reversed polarity (amature mistake), and that most, if not all of the connectors on the monitor had been either damaged or were so completely worn that they weren't making good connections.  After he replaced the pins in each connector it began working perfectly.  It was all a hard earned lesson for me, check the connectors, double check your work.  Jeeeze!
Once I had the monitor working I felt satisfied that the project was worth completing and I ordered the replacement artwork from Arcadeshop.com.  The underglass artwork was nasty and destroyed, and the control panels were also toast.  The control panels would need to be stripped down, sanded and repainted, then the artwork applied and buttons remounted.  So I took this time to decide that I'd add a little bling to the finished item, perhaps some new lighted buttons in a light blue to match the artwork would be just the thing.  This is where the bulk of the expense for this project is going.  New artwork is a little expensive.  The underglass art was $45 dollars and the control panel overlays were another $40.  I didn't mind really too much, I feel like if I can keep this project under $300 It will be well worth it.

Now to have a look at the glass top and whatever is underneath.  These glass tops and their artwork have always been full of surprises for me.  I now accept that by taking up the glass you're never sure what you'll find.  My Ms. Pac cocktail had Galaxian artwork under it, and my frogger cocktail had a dark wooodgrain under the black painted glass.  This cabinet had what looked to be a piece of imitation leather on top of the craziest looking wood laminate I've ever seen.  This was pure 70's delight baby. 

So here I am, with another dilemma.  I needed the top to look similar to the woodgrain on the sides of the cabinet, not this crazy garbage, this is why it had the imitation leather overlay.  I contemplated finding a piece of matching or similar laminate to go over this top, but settled on buying a piece of birch or oak plywood with a similar grain.  This way I could just replace the top, and stain the wood to match the existing woodgrain on the cabinet.
A trip to Lowes and I had exaclty what I needed.  I found a piece of 2' x 4' oak plywood for about $13.  It had a clean open grain and looked very similar to the imitation woodgrain on the cabinet.  I clamped the old top to the plywood, and using my router made an exact copy.

This was a piece of cake, biggest problem was the mess it made.  I then used a rabbit bit to cut the inside bevel for the smoked monitor plexi. If you're paying attention you'll be wondering about the t-molding on the sides of the top, I have a slot cutting bit for my router that I used in a previous project, so that was a simple fix.  A little Minwax Red Oak stain and it looked surprisingly good.
I have a buddy in the glass business, he stopped by and measured the old glass top for me.
A few days later I had the new glass top, new artwork, and a pretty spiffy looking Asteroids cocktail table.

Cabinet Work Begins

As you can see by the date of  my previous post, it's been over a year since I did any work on this project.  The cabinet isn't exactly awful looking.  I guess the biggest issue I have with it is the stupid location of the added credit button.  At some previous date someone decided to drill a hole in the front of the cabinet and mount a button there for adding credits.  Its right there on the front panel.  Both myself and my daughter Kylie hit it with our knee while playing a game and its annoying to say the least.  The only way I see to get rid of the button hole is to fill it with Bondo and paint over it,  so I may as well take this time and repair the whole cabinet and repaint it.

So I finally try Bondo.  Awesome, amazing, I can't believe I didn't try it sooner.  It took a little getting used to how it works but its so sweet.  Basically you can build up missing corners and fill holes and scratches to your hearts content.

It took me maybe four applications and sanding sessions to get it right.  After that the cabinet was smooth as silk, and looking good.

As you can see, I had parts of the speaker slots missing or de-laminated and other splits and cracks here and there.  There was the usual security bar holes and a well placed button hole in the front, perfect for adding credits with your knee, installed there by a previous genius.

I then used a color code for some oil based paint I found on google:
Valspar Anti-Rust B-4 Clear Base and 107-7, 111-1Y26, 113-30, 116-32.5
from Lowes.

Well the paint was excellent, the color was dead on.  However, I suck at painting, and I won't even go into all the damn little gnats and flies that decided they should end there miserable little lives by flying strait into my cabinet.  Its time I invested in a decent paint sprayer, cause I certainly cant roll paint worth a damn.

As you can no doubt tell from these pictures, its a little too shiny.  Maybe that will change as it cures, but I'm not exactly proud of the look.  While all this was drying I took the time to sand down the nasty coin door and painted it with Rustoleum Hammer Textured Spray paint, then a light coat of gloss black over the door and top marque holder.  Those turned out to look near perfect.  I then added two new coin mechs that I had ordered from TwistedQuarter.com.  The coin door looks great, but obviously I couldn't be bothered to take a picture of it.

My next step is to let this cab cure for a week and repaint the black parts of the cabinet.