Tempest

This Tempest basically fell into my lap.  Brian, or Bamboo, on The Village forum, was offering two of these up for sale or trade, so I offered up my Ms. Pac.  He decided to go for it, to my surprise, and I agreed to haul the games.  This Tempest has a little water damage, but is in fine working order.  It needed a good deal of cleaning, and had the usual rodent nest and other filth from thirty years of use and storage.  None of this was a problem though, and within a few hours I had it reasonably clean and even the control panel and side art were looking pretty nice.
The Wells Gardener 6100 looked nice and bright but had a small amount of waviness and flicker.  Having heard horror stories about how difficult Tempest can be to keep running, I planned to rebuild the power brick, replace the big blue filter capacitor and rebuild the AR2 board.  I ordered these parts from Bob Roberts and while browsing his site I also noticed that he carried a cap kit for the Tempest PCB.   I of course ordered one of these as well, why not? 

I snapped this close up picture of the PCB while replacing the capacitors.  As you can see, the date stamped on the board is almost exactly 30 years ago.  So I'd say replacing the caps wasn't such a foolish idea.

When these parts arrived I decided to do the work and test each piece as I went to see which part corrected the waviness and jittery screen issues.   After replacing the bridge rectifier, filter capacitor and fuse block, the screen looked pretty sharp and steady again.  I then rebuilt the AR2 board, this didn't seem to have any effect.  After replacing the capacitors on the Tempest PCB, the display had to be realigned and adjusted, this also seemed to correct some of the jittery movement.  The game looks and plays great, and has a clean solid picture, so I'm happy with the work for now.

Jeff Hendrix designed a low voltage retrofit board called the LV2000 for the Wells Gardener 6100.  From the posts seen on KLOV the most common issue with Tempest is that the low voltage section of the K6100 fails.  I placed an order for one of these and it arrived in just a few days.  The installation is quite easy and can be reversed if there is ever the need to.  Here is a link to Jeff's site .  After installing the LV2000 lite, I had to adjust the picture once again.  That's it for now.  I should probably look at doing a complete cap replacement on the K6100, but for now I'll just let it be.  The picture looks great and holds very clear and steady.  I'll likely install a fan in the top of the game or back door to keep the monitor cool, as it seems to run a little on the hot side.

Meh

I ended up cutting out a couple of control panel pieces for FrizzelFried from the klov forum. His has the same busted control panel sides as I do, so hopefully he'll be able to get it resolved. After reading about how he traced around the side art on a Battle Zone, and peeled off the vinyl, I decided that was exactly what needed to be done to this Gravitar.

I was totally blown away by how much this simple method helped. Most of the funk and damage went with the peeled off vinyl. Anyway so I started the Bondo work and this cab is going to come together nicely.

Back at it again.

It's been way too hot to do any work in the garage, in fact it's been wicked hot this summer.  I turned my games on maybe once or twice, and was worried they would spontaniously combust.

I'm not sure what I was thinking in that last post, but Jim had that monitor back in tip-top-shape the next day.  The Wells Gardner 6100 looks fantastic, testing it on the Space Duel, it looks even better than the one in the Space Duel.  That's saying alot, cause it has a brand new tube.

My plan was to just find someone who could repair the Gravitar board, I tried the easy stuff.  At this point I just felt like getting started on the cabinet again.  After posting for help with the board on http://www.arcadeflorida.com/ and http://www.klov.com/ then not getting any interest,  I shipped the board out to Eldorado Games.  So, I'll just wait to hear from them. 

While hurricane Irene is churning out in the Atlantinc and heading up the east coast, I got started on the cabinet.  Odd thing about having a hurricane close by, they tend to pull dryer air in, which is a tremendous relief to being outdoors.  I was able to replace the four busted corners using a tracing bit on my router.  Replacing them with the new "copy" and gluing in place with a well placed biscuit joint.  Here are a few shots of the progress.