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.