Alien Syndrome Cabinet Restoration

In an earlier post I mentioned this cabinet wasn't in the best shape.  Normally, if the damage isn't real bad, or the side art is just pealing up around the edges, I'll just have a go at cleaning up the cabinet and getting things looking acceptable.  For this game, since it has a unique look, and a really awesome design, I've decided to do a full restore of the side art, and laminate sections.

Having a quick look on KLOV, there were a couple of excellent documented restorations of this same cabinet.  Seeing how good they worked out, I took the same route.  I ordered up 3 sheets of WilsonArt vertical grade satin/matte laminate in black.  If you're careful you can get by with just two sheets, luckily I had three, because I had a few accidents.

To remove the artwork and vinyl coating I used a product called Quick-Strip.  It gets globbed on, since it's a gel, and really just eats away at whatever it touches.  So in about 20 minutes, the black covering started to bubble up and wrinkle.  Then I just used a scrapper and worked it up as best I could.   I should mention that I used painters tape around the edges to keep the Quick-Strip from dripping down over the sides.  Also, I wore a respirator, but I ran out of plastic gloves.  I would recommend using gloves, since afterwards, and for about 3 days, I didn't have much feeling in the ends of my fingers.  And this was with touching it very little, just enough to pull up small sections of the rubbery vinyl.

You can also see that some of the edges had the usual water damage, and bangs and bruises.  For those I mixed up several batches of Bondo, followed by careful sanding.  The lower back corners were almost completely gone, and those needed built up and shaped to look original.  This whole process took several days.

If you've never applied laminate, you're in for a treat.  While it absolutely blows away any finish you can usually achieve with paint, it's a pain in the butt to get right.

First thing is it comes in a 4x8 sheet, which is somewhat fragile, you can't bang it on anything, or bend it too much, or it will crack or snap.  You then need to cut a piece from the sheet, which is approximately the size of your surface, again being careful not to break or crack the laminate.

Perhaps there are better ways, but I used a contact cement.  This stuff gets painted on both the cabinet and the back of the laminate, then left to dry for about 25 minutes.  Once that's dry, you have to "carefully" bring the two surfaces together.  The moment they touch, it's game over, that stuff wont come loose, and there is no adjustment possible.  So I used a few wood dowels between the two surfaces, then pulled them out one at a time once the alignment was correct.  Oh, and almost forgot, if you have even a spec of dirt, a bit of saw dust, anything between the two surfaces, it will show as a bump when finished.  Ask me how I know.

Once the laminate is applied, I used a roller, designed for pressing down laminate, and rolled the whole thing over and over with a good deal of pressure, again being careful not to crack the edges.

Lastly the whole outer edge was cut using a tracing router bit.  That's the easy part.  Notice I don't have any pictures of the previously mentioned steps, that's likely due to the frustration I was going through.

One trick I learned, don't apply the contact cement with a paint brush, use a flat spatula type spreader, and just pour a small amount on the surface and quickly spread it around.  It's much easier, and you can get a much thinner layer down, much faster too.  Just don't let the lady of the house see you sneaking out with the spatula.

Once the laminate is all on and neatly trimmed, it's a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  Sorry about those pictures,  I was dodging rain showers most of the time just to get this done.

I also patched up those damaged areas on the inner panels above the control panel area.  One of them actually still had a large piece of screw still embedded in the surface.  To repair this damage took several days of sanding, and filling with Bondo putty, and more sanding.  Followed up with layers of high-fill primer, and more sanding until it was smooth, then several layers of satin black enamel paint.  Here are a few before and after pictures:

Now that the cabinet issues are sorted, it will receive a good cleaning inside and out, in preparation for the new reproduction artwork, which should be on it's way soon.

Disney reached out to our builders group, asking for 10 droids to attend their May 4th event at Hollywood Studios.  That's an offer no Star Wars fan can turn down.

After sending in a couple of pictures, R2-J8 was accepted for the event.  Lately this old droid has been needing some repairs, and I've just been letting it go.  So I decided I needed to fix some things, and if possible, use the event as an excuse to do some upgrades if time permitted.

Over the course of doing various events, I began to notice several panels not opening correctly on the dome, or not opening at all.  After doing a little testing, I came to the realization that I needed to replace 5 of the panel servos, and 2 of his holoprojector actuators.  I placed an order for 5 new servos on Amazon, and they arrived really fast.  So those were replaced without much grief, and J8 was back to his full 10 panel dome animations.

A few months ago I purchased an aluminum holo projector from the a guy on the Astromech forum.  Let me tell you, that thing looks sweet, really makes my 3D printed plastic holo projectors look shabby.  So I decided that would be a good upgrade to do, and that it would be a simple swap out of the old ones.  Also, if I'm going to do an upgrade, I want it to be something that everyone is focused on, and those projectors are front and center.  I had been having problems with the plastic 3D printed ones seizing up in the sockets, and I believe that has led to some of the actuating servos getting fried.

So once the holo projectors arrived, I got to work with the "quick swap out", which turned out to be anything but quick.  First thing, I had applied a loctite to the threads to keep them from working loose, so each and every little bolt was a chore to remove.  Then I found that the openings in the dome where smaller than the cowl for the new aluminum pieces.  This led to a few hours of sanding with the ol'sandpaper wrapped around a wine bottle technique.  In the end, I managed to replace the front facing projector and the rear projector.  The third top one I left alone, as I was running out of time.

With one day left before the event, I decided it was time to organize the womp rat's nest of wires I had created in J8's dome.  So using some woven cable tubing, I managed to get everything somewhat organized and looking much better.

So I met with most of the guys in the group over at Disney Springs for an early dinner.  I think the place was called Blaze Pizza.  The pizza was amazing, the weather was not.

We had two bouts of rain come through, one just before 8:00 PM and another shortly after arriving.  Fortunately I was able to get J8 assembled and into the building between showers.

The remainder of the night was excellent.  There were lots of great Star Wars fans, some even in costume.  R2-J8 had tons of pictures taken, with groups and dozens of selfies.  I had a great time as always, just driving around and working with the crowds.

We finished up around 12:30, and took a few group photos outside the Star Wars Launch Bay.

Alien Syndrome nasty power supply refresh

For the most part, I've always restored arcade cabinets from the early 80's.  Later in that decade, it seems the industry began to move from linear power supplies, to the smaller, switch mode power supplies common today in almost everything.  I can't pretend to know why, likely for cost reasons.  These can be purchased now for about $20.  Many collectors just chuck out the old power supply and replace it with a cheap Peter Chou knock off.  Seems to make sense, but on the other hand, often the new product has been made in such a way as to extract every fraction of a cent profit conceivable.  As I said in an earlier post, the game works, and actually plays fine. Which is a testament to the design quality of the power supply. It's voltages were correct when tested with a multi-meter, but I could hear a loud hiss coming from the base of the cabinet, and I'm willing to bet the capacitors in there are dried up and bulging or leaking.

Since I now own an oscilloscope, and I'm just beginning to learn how to use it, I decided to take a look at the 5V output.  The display should be a nice flat line, what you don't want to see is AC ripple passing through.  I got this:

Yikes, not good.

Once I opened up the case, I could see most of the caps were bulging on the tops, and two were leaking.

So, after discharging those nasty capacitors, I decided to give it a bath, yes with soap and water:

I like that it has the year 1987 printed on the board, and Peter Chou.  Again, I'm no expert on switch mode power supplies, but this would have to be one of the earliest original Peter Chou models.  So I did a quick inventory of the caps, and jumped on Digi-key's website to place an order.

Meanwhile I cleaned up the enclosure, being careful not to scrub away the labels.  You can see it's a nice shiny blue, and it cleaned up really well:

I ordered the best quality Nichicon caps I could find, and had them by Wednesday evening:

A few months ago I was doing a lot of work on an old Vectorbeam monitor chassis, and I picked up a used panavise on ebay.  It makes working with these boards so easy:

To keep this post from getting really wordy I'll just say I swapped those caps out and got it looking spiffy. As David L. Jones would say, "Ah, she's a real bobby dazzler"!

Then I connected it to the oscilloscope again and as you can see, the signal is excellent, no AC ripple this time, and that annoying hiss is gone:

Alien Syndrome Has Arrived

Alien Syndrome Restoration

 I'd been wanting this game for quite a few years.  It's a fun game to play, and an interesting game to have in a collection.  When these are fully restored, I feel they are right up there with Tron as far as quirky artful presentation goes. Put simply, it's just a very cool game, with a great cabinet design.

A few weeks ago, one of these came up for sale, just over in Tampa, and I contacted the seller as soon as I saw it.  The listing had been up for two days, so naturally it was already spoken for, bummer.

I logged into the local collectors forum "theVillageBBS" and posted, asking who had snatched this game from my grasp.  Turns out it was the guy I had purchased a Battlezone from just last year.  As luck would have it, another collector, had one and since he was more of a pinball kinda collector, he offered to sell his.  Only catch, the game was in Jacksonville.

So I arranged to drive up, planned to meet with my daughter Kylie for dinner, since she's a student at UNF, and head back, all on a Wedneday afternoon.  This went as planned, and by Midnight that evening, having braved the perils of Interstate 4, I had the cabinet sitting in my shop.

So while the game is complete, and working, and the parts are primarily original, there was very little that wouldn't need some attention. 

Cosmetically it just looks better in pictures than in person.  It's just rough on all the edges. 

Starting with the control panel, there are little plexiglass windows, which when lighted from behind, serve to illuminate the instruction panel and the Sega logo.  The top plexi window had been pushed in and broken.  Then someone screwed a clear plexi onto the entire top surface of the panel to protect from further damage.

The front and sides of the cabinet have the usual scars from decades of being moved from place to place and generally being in public places.  While the side art is largely intact, it is torn off in places and there are several deep gouges. From the looks of it, there were either ashtrays or drink holders attached to the sides at some time.  There were also lock bars added, and the power switch had been unscrewed and mounted inside. 

The inside of the cabinet looks to be original.  The original power supply was in place and still working after 32 years.  Upon powering up the game, I could hear the power supply making a loud hiss.  I'm assuming the sound was coming from two large leaking filter capacitors, just visible through the dust.

Lastly the game circuit board, a Sega System 16 B Type, was still working, with it's original battery backed FD1089 suicide chip.  There are fixes for this, which involve replacing the FD1089 with a standard Motorolla 68K processor, and swapping out some of the ROM chips with non-encrypted versions of code.  If the battery dies on the current processor, it takes the encryption key with it, rendering the game dead.  This will need addressed, since after all these years, that little coin cell battery could go at any moment.

R2-J8 at Yuri's Night Space Coast

This year R2-J8 was invited to attend Yuri's Night at the Kennedy Space Center.  How could I pass up the chance to get some photos with the Space Shuttle Atlantis?!

To be honest, J8 wasn't the only droid invited.  My local R2 builders club "Southern R2 Builders" was there, along with some very talented Wall-E builders.

Our event organizers suggested we arrive early to get set up, as the party was set to begin at 8:00 PM.
For this event, I was determined to show up early and get some good pics, as it turned out, so did everyone else in our group.  We had nearly an hour to drive around the Atlantis Visitor Complex and take photos, and while the lighting wasn't exactly ideal, we managed to make the most of it.

Driving on the glass smooth floor was a droid wranglers dream.  Once I even took J8 to the 3rd floor just to see how well he handled the incline.  Out of fear of back charging the control circuitry rolling down to ground floor, I decided it best to take the elevator back.

Basically the entire place was transformed into a space age night club, with shuttle Atlantis suspended overhead, unbelievable!  Guests were actually better behaved than some of the Disney events I've attended.  There was a groovy DJ, a first rate laser light show, and special effects a plenty.

For most of the evening I drove J8 around, and through the crowd, often out onto the dance floor.  Once he even scooted into the VIP section, just under the nose of the bouncer.  My biggest concern when taking the droid out to an event is keeping him from running into people or hitting things, and I wasn't entirely sure a full on party would be possible.  Needless to say, all went well.

For me, it's always great to see a person completely startled at the site of an astromech droid, and this night had plenty of those moments.

  There were some awesome Star Wars, and Star Trek costumes, as well as other various space themed outfits.  One of the best outfits of the night was a 60's style engineer, with pocket protector, short sleeve button up shirt, and skinny neck tie, so classic Apollo era.

Anyway, even though I got home very late, and I mean 3AM late, I have to say I had a nice time, and I'd do it again.

If you're looking for a unique and nerdy night out, check out Yuri's Night, it's an international party, held on April 12th each year to celebrate space exploration.