My Story...My Defender Restoration

mcgolfpro

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My Story...My First Restoration - Williams Defender

This is my first REAL restoration of a classic vid. About 10 years ago I had the ultimate find, I walked into a local TV/VCR repair shop and after being told that they didn't work on sony camcorders or whatever it was I had, I looked over in the corner and spotted an old dust covered Asteroids... My heart skipped a beat, I had been to the old KLOV website and they said this was one of the ways you find these things, just stumble onto them. I asked almost like I didn't care at all, "Is that for sale?" He replied "You want it???", "How much" I asked... and then I waited for the shoe to drop... He said "It doesn't work" I was a little disappointed then because I don't know crap about electronics, but I figured It was probably a good time to learn... I said "That's ok, how much?" He replied "It's my son's and I'm tired of it being in my shop, If you want it..TAKE IT" the jig was up at that point I couldn't hide my excitement.. "I'll be back!" I yelled over my shoulder on the way to go get my pickip and my brother in law to lif the beast...Asteriods was heavy... We got it back to my place and plugged it in, nothing, took the back cover off, found a toggle swith somewhere, flipped it and nothing...about that point I noticed the button plunger that would be pressed when the back cover was on, held it down and it came to life...It played perfect... I spent the next couple of months doing what I could, putting in coin mechs, cleaning things up, I didn't paint over the side art, but i do remember doing a cheesy black paint job around it, replaced T-molding, and I think I painted some of the silk screen on the control panel black...A TRAVESTY I know... The game went TU a few months later and I had no idea how to fix it, I got a multimeter out and tested what I could, but I really had no idea...

Finally I made contact with a dealer in Portland, Oregon about 3 1/2 hours away, he had a full size Missile Command and I told him I had a non-working Asteroids he said bring it down and we could work something out...I loaded it up in my wifes mini-van (It rains in Portland!) and hauled it down, we got it out and set it up in the guys showroom, plugged it in and it returned to life!!! I should have packed it back up and left, but I opted for the Missile Command - That WAS MY game when I was growing up! I think I gave him a hundred bucks or something like that for the trade and was happy for a short time, after I got it home and the euphoria of having my own missile command wore off, I started to notice the tracball was lagging and a little sloppy, I did some research, replaced some bearings but it still didn't work perfectly...So I called the guy in Portland, he said bring it back down and he would get it going for nothing...I then asked what abouot getting a defender? He said he had one he would trade straight across for it, but I would have to wait while the PCB main board was being repiared. So I waited, and waited, and waited it was almost eight months later when he said the machine was ready, I drove down dropped the missile command off and started to play my defender....but more problems the sound was off, another glitch I can't remember...I pointed them out to him and he agreed it needed more work...It was December, I was leery of waiting more months, and I asked how much would he give me to just walk away, he said $600. Christmas was coming, I had a wife and a toddler at home, $600 was a lot of money then so I took the cash and got out of the classic vid biz....

I never forgot about them though, they hooked my when I was a kid and they had hooked me again in a different way after opening the back of my first Asteroids. I looked around here and there, but the time wasn't right. Finally I happened across a Defender on an old defunct Craigslist ad - the search still had the summary on searchallofcraigs.org but the original ad was gone. I was able to see the phone number called it and, I was going to be up in Seattle anyway, so I called my best friend from high school- HE was a defender master, he has flipped it over on more than one occasion and could play for hours on one quarter...Told him I had a line on a Defender, it was working perfectly the owner said but the cab needed some TLC. He said something like "You name the Time and Place- IM THERE!" So we made our way to Sedro Wooly, Washington for THE machine. It was in a dump of a house... Kids running around, the Mom was over an hour late for our meeting time, I figured sweet this was all going to add up to less $$$ to pay for the machine. We looked it over, it started up nicely...I had done a little research online, I ran the RAM and ROM tests it all came up good, played well, I looked for the battery holder and any corrosion, batteries were left in, not much acid leak though so I waited for the Mom to get home figuring this would be an easy negotiation, SHE wouldn't budge...She called her ex-husband who she said owned the game, and when she came back from talking to him on the phone- she was almost in tears! RU kidding me! So my buddy and I looked at her and forked over close to full price- I'm too embarrased to say how much, After making $500 on the Asteriods/Missile command deal ten years earlier, I was still very safely in the black. (that's what I told my wife too).

It made the trip home intact, but it would only start up in book-keeping mode, I could manually advance it to play, but once powered off- back to book keeping. I looked online, found all the post about being a battery issue, but it didn't do it when we first looked at the game and the batteries were corroded.

So after playing for a week or so, I decided to get started on a complete and original restoration to the best of my ability. Here is how it looked when I picked it up.
 

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When I opened it up

I open it up and took the following inventory:

Serial #524571
Matching Video, Sound PCB's and Power Supply all dated Sept 1981
Old plastic coin mech
empty crumpled box of nerds
mini plastic american flag
pasturized process cheese slice wrapper
empty fuse bag
2 fuse bags with one fuse left in each hmmm.... That might be an issue huh?
used band aid (nasty)
2 qurters one 1998 one 1983
dead spider
lots o dust!
 

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I get to work

I figured to do the best job on the cab I would need to remove everything first so as not to damage anything with sanding dust flying around, bondo, more sanding etc. etc. Inside was what I guessed to be braided grounding wire, stapled everywhere... Has anybody seen this on the inside of their cabs? If not, any suggestions about what that might indicate would help...
 

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You're right, it's just grounding braid. It's supposed to be there and has been in both Defenders I have owned and worked on.
 
I find it interesting that the inside of the cab is painted black. Mind is bare wood and so is every other Defender cab that I have seen.
 
Taking care of delamination and damage on the bottom of the cab

Today I decided to take care of pretty severe delamination possibly some slight water damage on the bottom of all four panels of my cabinet. After considering injecting the panels with epoxy/glue and clamping, I dicided that the damage was just to severe. I measured the distance that the panels extend past the bottom plate that the power supply support plate/power supply sits on, One and a half inches - exactly the width of a two by four! So I decided to trim the panels even with the bottom plate and I will then attach a two by four framework to the bottom of the cab, patch any gaps with bondo, sand to level and paint. I figure if I do a good enough fitting, bondo job, and sanding no-one should be the wiser when its finished. I also figured that would be a better base and help prevent the plywood veneer from further damage when the cab is moved. I will re-drill and put levelers on as well... If I'm totally off base here- don't burst my bubble to hard, I have already made the cuts!
 

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Have you ever brought your Defender into Lowes?

So tonight was the night to try to get a paint match...So I loaded the cabinet up in the truck and headed to Lowes! I had stopped by earlier and talked to the girl at the paint desk and asked what the chances would be to match some paint colors from a "cabinet", she told me to just bring one of the drawers in and... I finally had to spill the beans well it's not really THAT kind of cabinet... so on and so forth and after a quick trip home and back I was wheeling my defender cab up to the paint desk, middle aged men ooogling my defender cab, young kids with quizical looks on their faces, and pretty much eye rolls and universal disgust from every female- except the one who was working at the paint counter! No luck though, they weren't able to get a match - I picked the closest thing from all the samples they had:

RED: Olympic A27-6 Crossfire
YELLOW: Valspar 3007-1C Golden Mist

At least the names were halfway cool, don't think I could bear it if I was going to paint my cab Coastal Cranberry and Yellow Chiffon....

Pics below the girl sweeping was the one who was helping me, I think she wanted to get as far away as possible when I pulled my camera out.

I'm not done though, I may try a dedicated paint store and see if they can come up with something, stay tuned...
 

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I usually take a stack of paint samples from the store home to match the cab, not the other way around. ;)

Actually, I wish stores had handheld spectrophotometers that you could sign out and bring home to get an exact match of paint colours on any sized object. It's not often I get a colour I'm trying to match on something that'll actually fit in their little stationary machines.
 
I have recently been told to find an auto paint shop. Most of the good ones have an optical comparator and can automatically custom mix practically any color. I have not tried to test this theory out, but I got it from a friend that is big time into cars and he has used one near me for all kinds of things besides cars.

I was told by the paint person at Home Depot that some of the newer stores have a portable optical comparator for matching oddball items (like video game cabinets :)) in addition to the little ones that can only look at paper sized things to color match.

The reason I know is that the last time I tried to match the color on my Moon Patrol I asked if I could just bring it in and the one girl said "Sure", then the older one asked how big it was and when told, explained the limitations of the desktop color comparator. It needs something thin like cardboard thickness max and it has to be able to make a light tight seal around the item to measure accurately so it won't do a decent job on anything like a video game cabinet. :(

Well, it's not my problem now. I finally sold it over the weekend and the new owner will be picking it up Thursday along with the Joust he bought at the same time. Now I have some garage space to play with :) :D

ken
 
Been working not Posting...

I added the "Cleats" on the bottom of my cab to replace the damaged areas I cut off, the pics show what they look like when they first went on. I have since sanded them to be perfectly flush with the cabinet. After some bondo the fix the remaining minor damage to the bottom of the cab and some primer and paint, they should blend in nicely. I still need to install leveling feet. I have seen casters but that really doesn't excite me, I thought of installing teflon sliders on the bottom of the feet to make moving easier...Anybody seen anything else used on the bottom of these cabs?

Also I am looking for a stainless steel frame for a coin door I found. Anybody? I posted a WTB thread in the trading forum for it already. Thanks-
 

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Sanding started

I started the serious sanding this weekend, I took some measurements for the placement of the art and got my stencils out that I received from gamestencils.com - they seem to be OK, I'm fairly picky though, it seems about 95% accurate to me, my sides are reversed from the stencils and the back of the "Defender Man/Humaniod" on the stencils closest to the rear of the cab on both sides, on my machine it's different for each side. I have seen other cabs and threads on here that show many variances with the side art so thats not the problem with the stencils, just many of the rounded edges of the original art come to a point in the stencils etc. etc. I just woould have liked more attention to detail in some areas but I don't want it bad enough to mask it off myself...

I'll post some stencil pics vs original later...
 

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Are you saying that you have 2 side stencils - one with the man under the "D" and one with the man under the "R"? If you want to keep your cab the same as it is now can't you just use the 'under the "D"' stencil on both sides?
 
A New Cabinet! A New Direction...

A trip north a couple of hours away to Spokane last weekend to pick up a stainless coin door from Dan (djw90) went great! I got a superb coin door and another cabinet with a coin door, jamma harness and power supply and an old control panel that was left in the bottom of the cab. Dan virtually threw in the cabinet for free with the second coin door, I think he wanted the space in his workshop! The cab had the back panel, and it still had the wiring diagrams attached! After seeing his Williams Multi in action I think I definately want to turn mine into one, I'll continue with the restoration as I planned but I'll use the new cab and when I get to the control panel I'll have some decisions to make.

P.S. The look on my wifes face was priceless when I pulled in with a SECOND defender cabinet!
 

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SO I'M NOT LOSING IT!!! That new cab of yours is NOT painted black on the inside!:D

The first run silver coin doors are pretty damn cool looking. Nice pick-up!
 
Amazing

I'm EXTREMELY NEW to the revamping of a video game! Bought my first machine yesterday, and NOW I'M HUNGRY! I'm on the hunt to start with something simple... but after reading this story and seeing this done right, I'm onto a whole new thing!

I can't wait to see more on this defender!
 
I'm Back!

After 9 months away from posting anything I am back to work on my Williams Defender restoration. (please forgive me - I got a boat last summer) Got the power supply out today and cleaned it up. I used a paint brush, alcohol and Q-tips. I think I'm going to clean the PCB's, the monitor etc. the same way. I don't have the guts to put anything in the dishwasher. Has anybody done that? Any other ideas on how to clean these things? I'm especially curious about how people clean their monitors...

Below are the before and after pics, it came out pretty good. I suppose I could have removed all the components and repainted the board - but c'mon this is the inside, I could have cleaned all day, gotta make some progress so I can play some defender...
 

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Pics of the new Cab, Paint colors revisited

Here are some pics of the gutted cab I got from drj90 - Dan is the Man! This cabinet is much more structurally solid than my original, paint was in much better shape, so much so that I went back to my local paint department(s) Lowes & Home Depot and re-checked my paint matches (see previous post). I didn't take my cabinet to the store this time- I knew they couldn't get a read with their spectrophotometer from the side of my cab, so I just took some paint chips off the cab- I'm gonna bondo and primer and black anyway, just wanted to get a good paint match before I sanded over it. The red I found seemed pretty much dead on, the yellow is about 90 percent there, whats funny is, depending on where you pull color from the shades change - significantly. I'm assuming that from many factors, how good original paint job was, amount of sunlight the paint has been exposed to etc. etc. The Red and Yellow on this cab is much fresher than my first one so I'm glad I got to see the better paint and match it.

RED: Valspar 1010-3 Heirloom Red (Lowe's)
YELLOW: Valspar 3007-1A Yellow Mustard (Lowe's)
 

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