Cap kit and Power Brick

This was the result of one of those things you do when you're in the middle of a task.  After discharging the monitor and unbolting it from the cabinet,  I decided to place it on top of a small shop stool that was nearby.  Then I grab the can of compressed air and thought " I don't want this dust in here" so I wheel the whole thing out into the driveway.  Shortly there after I notice people gawking and pointing.  Yes folks I'm a dork.

I don't need to go into details here.  Suffice it to say that I replaced the capacitors on this monitors chassis.  Not particularly difficult, in fact, it may have been one of the easiest so far.  It was very dusty, obviously hadn't been touched since the early 1980s.

Here's a shot of the chassis of the Matsushita TM202G layed out on the workbench ready to have all those little capacitors unsoldered and replaced with fresh ones.  This also gave me a chance to wipe away some of the accumulated filth and dust.  If you're doing this, be sure to familiarize yourself with the various on board controls, they're very hard to see once you put it all back together and mount it in the cabinet.

Okay, one last shot of the monitor and you can forget about it for another 25 years.  Notice how clean it looks now.  Nice.  I know some of you folks like to take a water hose to these and get them squeaky clean.  I haven't been able to bring myself to that yet. 

Now on to the power brick.  These are almost always nasty.  This one looks pretty good.  Bob sells a kit that comes with the various fuses, a new fuse block, crimp connectors, bridge rectifier, and a new Big Blue capacitor (http://www.therealbobroberts.net/).  It really doesn't take long to clean this up and replace the parts.  If the base is nasty, clean it up with some sandpaper or just remove everything and give it a good coat of rustoleum bronze spray paint.  This one was pretty nice, so all I had to do was wipe down the wires with some simple green and dust it off good.

Ching! Sparkle, sparkle.  That's better.  This puppy will now be throwing out proper voltages, and looking stunning all the while.  I then replaced the busted, tired old power cord with a brand new one, complete with a proper ground pin.  A lot more vacuuming in the base of the cabinet, and then I replaced the second Big Blue.  I find a few more tokens that Kylie missed in the base of the cab, and clean out what looks to be spilled Coke that must have seeped in from the cockpit area 20 years ago.

This is perhaps the best thing I've found so far in a cabinet: An out of order sign from the early days of desktop publishing, half eaten by mice.  I can just remember using these kind of graphics and printing things out on a dot matrix printer, it sucked, but sure looked better than a handmade note. That wraps up this order of parts.  I still don't have a working game.  The monitor now does an excellent job of displaying a screen full of garbage that only looks remotely like the original game (ah someday ).  Next up, the AR boards.