Restoring a Super Pac Cocktail

Did you rip the old stuff off or just apply over? Whichever it still looks great!
 
Took a week off from this project, as I was down in Milwaukee, WI last weekend for the Midwest Gaming Classic. Now that I'm back, I'm ready to start tackling more stuff on this project.

I stopped by the powder coaters Friday morning to see if they were done with my parts yet. They were not, but said they'd finish them by the end of the day. I wanted to get back there by 3:30pm to pick the parts up, but I couldn't get away from work until close to 4:00pm, so I'll have to wait until Monday to get my metal parts. Oh well.

Last weekend Bryan from Paradise Arcade hooked me up with some sweet parts for this table including a new piece of glass and new cocktail clips. Very excited to have those.

Also received my artwork from Brendon at Pacific Arcades last week too.

I spent the better part of the week rebuilding my Midway Medium power supply board. Peter (security0001) at arcadepartsandrepair.com was kind enough to put together a rebuild kit for me. He also hooked me up with a 4900 rebuild kit for my chassis, and a replacement G07 flyback for the piece-o-crap fly that toasted after 2 minutes that I got from Bob Roberts.

I finished rebuilding the medium power supply board this morning and figured I'd lay out all the wiring and see if I could get something going on the franken-monitor I have.

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Sweet!! Super Pac lives again!



Now that I have the electronics handled, the rest of the work should be easy. Just a few more parts to clean up, artwork to install, and put everything back together.

Progress! Gotta love it.
 
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More updates. The weekend weather was very nice, but unfortunately life gets in the way of projects some times, and I didn't get as much done on this as I wanted to. But I was able to keep pushing ahead.

I applied the new CPO's I got from Pacific Arcade Artwork. To aid in moving the polycarbonate laminate around the bends, I used a heat gun to soften them prior to bending. Hopefully that will cut down on cracking in the future. Rich from This Old Game tried a new laminate material on these, so we'll see how they hold up.

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The vector was a pretty good job. Just a hair out of center. I did my best to make sure the overlay was covering the whole panel from side-to-side, yet aligned as close I could to the joystick hole. Had I centered the artwork on the panel, it would thrown the hole out of center. Had I centered the image on the joystick hole, it would have left the artwork placement not covering the whole panel on one side. In the end, I compromised by splitting the difference. The result was only about 1mm or so off center, which 99.99% of people are probably not going to notice. Ah...the challenges of reproduction artwork. I'm pleased with the end result though:

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After sitting for a few weeks, my leg leveler plates started to develop some surface rust because I forgot to spray them with primer. So I re-sanded them and shot them with black. That should keep them from rusting in the future.

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I also re-attached the side panel to the table top after giving the table top a new coat of paint:

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Now I'm turning my attention to the power brick. Disassembly, cleaning, then I will shoot the base of the brick with silver spray paint.

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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 :(
 
A few more.....

Control panel plexi, one before I cleaned it, and the other one after (holy crap!)

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Nasty button crud, cleaned from the rims....

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Stay tuned for more pics. She's looking pretty!!
 
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I could honestly read threads like this all day long. Love seeing what talented people can do with worn down games and it helps motivate me to do what I can on my games and to keep learning new skills to do even more.
 
Looking really sweet!

I could honestly read threads like this all day long. Love seeing what talented people can do with worn down games and it helps motivate me to do what I can on my games and to keep learning new skills to do even more.

Thanks guys! I appreciate the kind words. This is definitely a labor of love, that's for sure. I always forget how much work goes into a full cabinet restoration. I'm sure by the time I'm 100% done I'll be happy, but right now I'm just ready for it to be over. I KNEW there was a reason I only did about 1 of these a year :)

Sorry for the crappy cell phone pics, but I did manage to put the coin door back together last night. Earlier in the thread I mentioned that I was using Takeman's repro coin door to hold all my parts. I decided not to use his repro door for 2 reasons:

1. His door did not have the textured paint job, and my powder coater was able to do this
2. His door lacked the upper coin meter bracket. Not a huge deal since the meter could be mounted using just the lower holes, but it's more stable if you can screw it in on both the top and bottom.

I found a few things wrong with my wiring harness as I was putting everything back together. It appears that someone cut the coin signal wire near the harness connector. YOu can see it in the "before pic" posted below; it's the yellow wire. At first I had thought it was just a situation where the wire may have gotten pinched and clipped, but when I was putting everything back together, I realized that there was about a 2 inch chunk of wire missing. It wasn't as simple as just re-joining the wires, because it would have pulled on the rest of the harness. So I de-pinned the wire from the connector block, found some yellow 22 gauge wire, and re-created the last 6 inch piece, complete with correctly sized AMP .084 terminal pin. It really helps to have the correct tools over years of working with these machines. I was able to release the old pin and re-crimp a new one using the proper tools. Makes life SO much easier. You can see the results of my repair work in my "after pic." The shiny new yellow wire? That's my work :)

I also made one error when I dropped my door off at the powder coaters. I forgot to tell them that the bottom stud for the right coin insert bezel was broken off. I was going to grind off the nub that was left and JB weld a replacement stud in place, but I forgot, and now the door is freshly powder coated :(

Unfortunately, that stud not only holds the bottom of the bezel for the coin bezel, it also held the lamp fixture too. So, I chose to compromise and mount the light fixture on the top stud, upside-down. Oh well. No one will notice the inverted light fixture when the door is closed, and the top stud does a fine job holding the bezel frame in place by itself.

I BRIEFLY considered trying to find a way to re-use my rivet heads on the new Midway logo plate, but I thought better of it. It would have meant that I would have had to drill out holes for the rivet heads, and with my luck I'd end up scratching the new plate. I chose to just stick it in place and be done with it. Concessions, I guess.

Overall, the coin door came out VERY good. The texture the power coater used this time is a bit more "chunky" than I would have asked for, but it's still better than a flat finish. It's more of a hammered look now.

Pics:

Before restoration:

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After:

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When I get home today, I'll try and snap some pics with the DSLR in some better lighting.
 
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Got the coin door mounted tonight, as well as the t-molding for the control panels. Here's a few shots.

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Just to frustrate me, I decided to log my expenses:

  • Auction winning bid plus fees & taxes: $415
  • Replacement wiring harness, extra control panels, brick: $150
  • Monitor rebuild kit: $46
  • Imonex Coin mechs: $12 (1 to spare)
  • Midway Coin Door badge: $15
  • T-molding, leg levelers: $45
  • Woodgrain Laminate: $78
  • Artwork: underlay & CPO's: $120
  • Game pcb: (pulled from storage): $50
  • Replacement Glass: ???
  • Powdercoating: ??
  • Midway power supply (pulled from storage): $25
  • power supply rebuild kit: ??
  • Misc supplies (sandpaper, rubber cement, bondo, etc) $25

Total so far: $981. Ugh. And I still have to pay the glass guy and the painter.

I SHOULD be able to sell some of my extra parts though.

  • Extra control panels: $50
  • Extra power brick: $25
  • Ms Pac pcb: $50
  • Extra Coin Co and Imonex coin mechs: $20
  • Hacked harness: $10
Total: $155

But that will pretty much net me on the remaining glass and powder coating cost. Either way you look at it, I'm into this thing for nearly a grand at this point, and that's not counting my time and labor.

Parts still needed: manual

I did this in my DK restore thread. It's upsetting when you tally it all up. Plus there are myriad little things I didn't log yet. Spray paint, lube and so on.
 
Managed to borrow a t-molding slot cutter bit for the router from my friend Dave (dlbagna). I'm so glad I waited until I had this bit in my hands before cutting the corners. It does such a good job.

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Here's a shot in the middle of installing the 1" molding around the table top.

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And the cabinet, in its current state. All t-molding is now installed.

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I also spent a good amount of time wiping down the inside walls, ground straps, and pcb mounting strips to remove all the dust and years of accumulated dirt and grime. Looks pretty good inside now.

Tonight I'll probably install the power brick, work on the AC power cord and install it, and mount the monitor.

When I get photos of the inside of another cab, I'll be able to start working on mounting the wiring harness again.

I have some extra t-molding left over; here's a photo. I knew I bought too much. If anyone wants it, just shoot me a PM and we'll work out a deal for it.

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God damn that is sexy. You make me want to fix up my popeye cocktail. it looks worse than yours.

I'm PMing you to see what you have for sale and use it on my cocktail.
 
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