Forgot my digital camera in the garage today. I took LOTS of pics, which I will update this post with later.
I made a lot of progress on the cabinet this past weekend. I'm pushing to get this done in the next few weeks as I've got a garage sale planned the weekend of Mother's day, and I'd like to have this cabinet out of the garage by then.
I spent the whole weekend moving stuff around the garage and organizing to get rows of tables set up.
The power chassis assembly just wouldn't polish out well enough with anything I had on hand and I wasn't interested in completely disassembling the whole thing to sandblast it. So in the end I chose to mask off everything, and spray the base with silver paint. The end result isn't exactly the same finish as the original, but it looks a helluva lot better than it did before. I took some shots of another power supply I had laying around for comparison. It definitely looks a lot better now.
I was able to clean up the cabinet hinges with water and aluminum foil to do my best in polishing them up. Old chrome polishing trick I learned from the pop machine restore guys back in the day.
After reinstalling the hinge, I was able to close the cabinet back up and flip it over. I cleaned up the screw heads on all of the screws used to re-install the leg leveler plates and reinstalled the leg levelers as well as the cabinet fan. I rubbed the fan plate and grille down with sandpaper and steel wool and shot it with some black spraypaint before reinstalling. That pretty much took care of the bottom of the game.
Next, I turned my attention to the speaker grills. The black button head bolts that hold the speakers on were rusty, so I spun them against steel wool while chucked in my cordless drill, and sprayed them with black as well. I had to drill out the holes for the speaker bolts, so I went ahead and drilled out the holes for everything else on the cabinet sides too. Drilling through the laminate can cause blowouts pretty easily if you don't have a super sharp drill bit, so I chose to take the safer route and start my holes with a smaller bit to make a pilot hole from the inside out, then reaming out the hole from the front side with the correct sized bit. That way I could be sure there was zero chipping/tearing in the laminate.
While I was at it, I decided to run a large sharpie marker around all exposed laminate edges of the cabinet. Coloring in the edges black will made the laminate edges less noticeable. This isn't something that most people would have to be concerned about on a fresh cabinet build, but because I installed 1/16" laminate on all sides, my laminate will peek out from the t-molding just a hair. There's really no way to prevent this without undertaking MAJOR woodworking, such as running all panels through a planar before installing the laminate. The factory woodgrain is just vinyl adhered to plywood, so it's not like there was old laminate that I could have removed. I guess the other option would have been I could have purchased leatherette t-molding that was just a little bit wider than 3/4" and trimmed with with a molding trimmer, but that's a dicey process and finding the leatherette in another size would have been a pain in the ass. In the end, this will be nearly unnoticeable to the un-trained eye, and besides, we're talking maybe a millimeter or two here.
Next I moved on to the control panels. Earlier in the week I had glued laminate to the 4 wood sides and trimmed them flush, so they were ready for re-assembly. After giving each joystick assembly a good cleaning to remove dust and debris, I put everything back together. The P1 and P2 start buttons were a bit faded and chalky, but I kept them anyway. You need a LITTLE patina on a restored cab, right? I was able to clean up the super speed buttons well enough by slipping in a moistened paper towel between the plunger and button base and spinning it around to remove the years of accumulated gunk. I think they came out pretty good, so they will be reused too.
The additional 1/16" made the re-installation of the control panels a bit difficult; what was once a smooth fit is now a tight fit. But that's OK, these aren't supposed to go anywhere once installed anyway.
The monitor has been bugging me for weeks. I didn't like the way it was setup with a G07 tube and yoke being used with a 4900 chassis. I knew I was going to have to either swap the chassis or the tube/yoke to make this look right. Looking more closely at the monitor frame, I determined that the original monitor in this frame was indeed a Wells Gardner 19K4906. I recognized the metal mounting tabs as the same as found in my Karate Champ cab, and I found the model number sticker in the bottom of the cabinet as a clue as well
So why the G07 yoke and tube? My only logical guess is that at some point in the past a previous owner needed to swap out the tube. Perhaps it became so burned that the image was no longer acceptable. Perhaps the tube gave out or got necked. Hard to say. What IS apparent, however, is that whomever changed the tube just grabbed a G07 tube, metal shroud & yoke and slapped it into the assembly. Although this setup worked, the G07 yoke is not really compatible with the the 4900, causing some pretty significant pinsushion issues. Putting a proper 4900 yoke on the tube fixed those issues, so that's good.
Since the image was now fixed, I chose to swap the tube to a newer CRT pulled from a television. I stopped by Chris25810's a few weekends ago and he had a bunch of monitor tubes that had been pulled from TV's. One of them looked like it would be a good fit for this application, so I grabbed it. It had a small scratch on the tube face, but since this tube will live behind smoked plexi, no one will ever notice the scratch anyway.
The image I got when swapping the new tube in looks very good, so I'm happy to now have a properly sized, burn-free tube in the monitor of this game. The monitor is still using the G07 metal shroud surrounding the tube. I had to keep it because the degauss coil is part of the metal shroud and the degauss coil on the TV's tube was puny and wimpy and would have required modifications to the socket wiring to plug into the 4900 chassis. In the end I felt it was just a better idea to leave the G07 shround installed on the tube. It's not hurting anything by being there. If I come across a decent degauss ring from a 4900 monitor any time soon, I'll swap it out. In the mean time, it stays.
I shot a PM to roadrunner asking for some pics of the inside of his Super Pac so I can get a better idea of the proper ground strap and wiring harness routing as I prepare to to start re-loading the cabinet again.
I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is good!
Things still left to do:
- Reinstall all parts and wiring to newly powdercoated coin door assembly
- blast and repaint the metal mounting brackets for the power brick, mount them
- fix speaker connectors on wiring harness (wires were cut upon removal; need spade connectors)
- Remove, clean, and reinstall pcb mounting strips
- Install t-molding
- Install artwork on cocktail glass (I'm sweating this one, for sure)
- Change out the last 2 capacitors on the Midway medium power supply board (security0001 was out of stock when I got my rebuild kit)
- Recap the 4900 chassis
- Install wiring harness and ground straps
Crap, there's more left to do than I thought
