modessitt
Volunteer: Encyclopedia Submission Moderator
So, last week I call up a KLOV buddy of mine who lives about 45 mins away. I hadn't heard from him all week, and since he usually calls me a couple times a week to ask questions about some repairs he's doing, I figured I'd better check and see if he was still alive.
He had just sold some games to a guy who responded to a CL ad he had placed for one game, but the guy wanted more and ended up buying three. While I was talking to my buddy, the guy calls on his other phone and asks about a Defender sit down. Well, my buddy knows I have a project one in storage I wanted to fix up and sell someday, so he asks me how much I wanted to sell it for. I give him a price "for when it's ready to go", and the guy says, "Okay, I'll take it. Can you bring it on Sunday?" Hell, it's 8:30pm on Thursday, too late to get it out of storage and all the parts are out of it currently!
So - I have a working 13" K4800 lying around with a busted neck. I also have an old 13" color TV someone gave me, and I figure I'll swap the tube Thursday night and recap the chassis. Well, it turns out that the TV is way too old to have a compatible tube. Wonderful.
I get off work early on Friday and I go to storage and get the cabinet. I head over to the local Goodwill to check on their selection of 13" color TV's. They have quite a few, priced from $12 to $19, but I can't tell if they will work, as I can't open any up without buying it first. I call up another local KLOV buddy and have him look up TV models on the internet to see if we can get tube info, but it's hit and miss.
My buddy mentions he has a 13" TV in a closet and I can come over and check to see if it will work. I run over and we crack it open to find it's the exact same tube # as the broken K4800 tube I have at home. Since my buddy needs a tube for a broken K4800 of his own, and I recognize the TV he has as the same model as one of the $12 ones at Goodwill, I head back over and pick it up. I get home and open it up to find the exact same tube # as the one that's broken. The yokes were different of course, and I had to change the degauss connector, but it was a fairly painless swap and a great picture, too!
Okay, that's done. I had bought a working later-series Defender CPU (for the CT) a while back as I knew the one I had was too acid-damaged to be fixed easily. It had already had the lithium battery upgrade done on this working one, so that was good. Dug around in one of my Williams ROM board boxes and found two Defender ROM boards. Already had a widget, power supply, and sound board in the CT.
So, I put everything in and discover my first problem - the power switch was missing. No problem, as I have a couple new power switches in a drawer, but I had to manufacture a mounting plate where the big hole was on the bottom. Okay, that problem was solved.
I go to plug it in and discover my next problem - the end of the power cord was missing. Wonderful. I have no new ends, so I have to go out to Home Depot and pick up a couple (to have an extra), and get some paint while I'm at it. Come home and put it on and power it up.
Great - ROM 4 failure. I swap in the other ROM 4 from the other board and same error. Try the other board and it has bigger problems as it won't even come up. Could both ROM 4's be bad? At this point it was late Friday night and I couldn't do anything about it until the next morning.
Saturday - I don't have a ROM burner, so I called up the 2nd buddy (who has a Defender upright) and went over to test in his machine. Turns out it WAS two bad ROM 4's. His ROM 4 worked just fine. Got his brother to burn me a new one, and went back and all tests pass.
Except - it seems all the months I've had the board without using it has caused the battery to go dead. And I had no CR2032's, either. So back out to Walgreen's to grab a couple. Put one in, and I had a working game! Set the game on free play and sat down to try a few games.
Except - the screen didn't flip during 2-player games. Now, I knew from reading posts here that this was a jumper issue on the widget. Obviously, the widget in there wasn't indigenous to the game. Pulled out my manual, then removed jumper W1 on the widget. Everything was now working perfectly.
Pulled the power supply to make sure there were no cold solder joints (common) and found some to fix. Afterwards, everything was perfect. Just needed to do some cosmetics and it was ready for delivery. One of the control panel plastic overlays was cracked, but I had bought a pair of Defender CT control panels a while back from Chris25810 (one cracked and one nice) for that purpose, so that was a fairly painless replacment.
So - from a pile of scattered parts and an empty, dusty cab to a nice working machine in two days - all because someone was waving cash in my face. I need more motivation like that.
Now the guy is asking when I'm going to have my Area 51 Site 4 done. I told him, "Someday..."
Here's a pic of the working machine (and the living room I messed up while working on this and watching college football) before I did the CP swap and clean up/touch up. I forgot to take picture of the finished game...
He had just sold some games to a guy who responded to a CL ad he had placed for one game, but the guy wanted more and ended up buying three. While I was talking to my buddy, the guy calls on his other phone and asks about a Defender sit down. Well, my buddy knows I have a project one in storage I wanted to fix up and sell someday, so he asks me how much I wanted to sell it for. I give him a price "for when it's ready to go", and the guy says, "Okay, I'll take it. Can you bring it on Sunday?" Hell, it's 8:30pm on Thursday, too late to get it out of storage and all the parts are out of it currently!
So - I have a working 13" K4800 lying around with a busted neck. I also have an old 13" color TV someone gave me, and I figure I'll swap the tube Thursday night and recap the chassis. Well, it turns out that the TV is way too old to have a compatible tube. Wonderful.
I get off work early on Friday and I go to storage and get the cabinet. I head over to the local Goodwill to check on their selection of 13" color TV's. They have quite a few, priced from $12 to $19, but I can't tell if they will work, as I can't open any up without buying it first. I call up another local KLOV buddy and have him look up TV models on the internet to see if we can get tube info, but it's hit and miss.
My buddy mentions he has a 13" TV in a closet and I can come over and check to see if it will work. I run over and we crack it open to find it's the exact same tube # as the broken K4800 tube I have at home. Since my buddy needs a tube for a broken K4800 of his own, and I recognize the TV he has as the same model as one of the $12 ones at Goodwill, I head back over and pick it up. I get home and open it up to find the exact same tube # as the one that's broken. The yokes were different of course, and I had to change the degauss connector, but it was a fairly painless swap and a great picture, too!
Okay, that's done. I had bought a working later-series Defender CPU (for the CT) a while back as I knew the one I had was too acid-damaged to be fixed easily. It had already had the lithium battery upgrade done on this working one, so that was good. Dug around in one of my Williams ROM board boxes and found two Defender ROM boards. Already had a widget, power supply, and sound board in the CT.
So, I put everything in and discover my first problem - the power switch was missing. No problem, as I have a couple new power switches in a drawer, but I had to manufacture a mounting plate where the big hole was on the bottom. Okay, that problem was solved.
I go to plug it in and discover my next problem - the end of the power cord was missing. Wonderful. I have no new ends, so I have to go out to Home Depot and pick up a couple (to have an extra), and get some paint while I'm at it. Come home and put it on and power it up.
Great - ROM 4 failure. I swap in the other ROM 4 from the other board and same error. Try the other board and it has bigger problems as it won't even come up. Could both ROM 4's be bad? At this point it was late Friday night and I couldn't do anything about it until the next morning.
Saturday - I don't have a ROM burner, so I called up the 2nd buddy (who has a Defender upright) and went over to test in his machine. Turns out it WAS two bad ROM 4's. His ROM 4 worked just fine. Got his brother to burn me a new one, and went back and all tests pass.
Except - it seems all the months I've had the board without using it has caused the battery to go dead. And I had no CR2032's, either. So back out to Walgreen's to grab a couple. Put one in, and I had a working game! Set the game on free play and sat down to try a few games.
Except - the screen didn't flip during 2-player games. Now, I knew from reading posts here that this was a jumper issue on the widget. Obviously, the widget in there wasn't indigenous to the game. Pulled out my manual, then removed jumper W1 on the widget. Everything was now working perfectly.
Pulled the power supply to make sure there were no cold solder joints (common) and found some to fix. Afterwards, everything was perfect. Just needed to do some cosmetics and it was ready for delivery. One of the control panel plastic overlays was cracked, but I had bought a pair of Defender CT control panels a while back from Chris25810 (one cracked and one nice) for that purpose, so that was a fairly painless replacment.
So - from a pile of scattered parts and an empty, dusty cab to a nice working machine in two days - all because someone was waving cash in my face. I need more motivation like that.
Now the guy is asking when I'm going to have my Area 51 Site 4 done. I told him, "Someday..."
Here's a pic of the working machine (and the living room I messed up while working on this and watching college football) before I did the CP swap and clean up/touch up. I forgot to take picture of the finished game...

