Sunday Dirty Warehouse Raid Part Deux

YellowDog

In Memoriam

Donor 2011, 2013
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Location
Humble, Texas
Well it was Sunday and Joe (KatanaJoe), Trey (Punksareheretostay) and myself met up at the operator's site documented in part one (link)

I'll have new pictures up tonight.

We spent some time at the main office and picked up a bunch of interesting parts. Joe picked up a couple of interesting countertop machines and a Pole Position steering wheel. Trey found a Cat Box and some CPS2 games. And I picked up some IC trays full of parts, some Williams 7 digit pinball displays, some StarWars yoke gears and most importantly a pair of Nintendo K6510 keys so I can open the Donkey Kong cocktail. In fact when I found the keys I called everybody over, showed them the keys and said we could leave now. After some verbal abuse, we all went back to picking through stuff.

This trip, we had the opportunity to look in a new building and it was really sad. This building had probably the worst water damage yet. One of the first things we saw was a Pole Position II cockpit that had collapsed over onto a Pole Position that was melting. It was gut wrenching seeing the carnage. While poking through the remains, Trey picked up a few boards, I picked up a TMNT in Time board and Joe picked up some splinters.

We also took a look through the first warehouse we had gone to and while there, I took the time to try the keys in a couple Nintendo cocktails. The first one was a DKjr cocktail and the keys worked perfectly. When I lifted the top my fingers went right through the wooden part of the top and just lifted the glass. I was really sorry I even tried. The inside was pretty corroded once we managed to get the wood part lifted so we could look inside. One cocktail down and one more to try. The other DK cocktail wasn't quite as bad, but still had a lot of internal corrosion, so it was toast as well.

Trey helped Joe try to recover some pieces for his Centipede restore but wasn't able to get the coindoor off the melting cabinet, the bolts were completely rusted.

The third stop was the former tittie bar and Trey pulled a Dynamo cab with Xmen-COTA in it. Joe decided to go for the pidgeon redecorated Outrun cab with no board (if anyone has a working outrun board, drop Joe a PM).

The last stop was the same last building from the previous spelunking. Je got his harness out of the Astro Blaster. I picked up a bunch of locks and keys, most of which will be in the for sale section soon. I salvaged about 30 or so Fort Lock double bitted locks with keys, most with high security cams on them. According to our guide, they were the original locks from the games and they had been replaced with keyed alike locks when they were put out on route. Otherwise the guys doing the collections would have been carrying 10 pounds of keys for all the various locks. Oh and we found my headlamp that Joe left on the last trip. The light was still on!!?!! Those LED flashlights are amazing.

So overall, was it worth a 4 hour drive each way? Probably. I now have my Nintendo keys and a bunch of cool chips to play with. Joe has a couple of countertop games, including one that either called me a "Space Ace" or a "Space Case" (the voice synthesis was pretty bad). Trey has a new cabinet and some CPS2 sets to play with. And we all are probably going to need our tetanus shots updated along with any other vaccines we can think of.

I know, POIDH. The pictures will be posted tonight. I am at work and I downloaded them to my home computer last night.

ken

PS: any misspellings/grammatical mistakes were purely intentional.
 
As promised some of the pics:

The new building:
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More:
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My big find:
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Some of the chips and parts that were rescued:
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With a sign like that, we just had to:
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I'll be posting the rest to my photobucket pages in a little while.

Link to photobucket album: Link. The new pictures start on page 4.

ken
 

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your going to have to remove that picture of me i didn't sign a release form.... ;)

and wow my kid took an ok picture...

By agreeing to go on this expedition you agreed to allow the use of your picture or likeness for any purpose without compensation. Always read the fine print ;)

ken
 
If you find another circus charlie...

It will probably be melting into the floor like most of the rest of them.

Actually the guy said that last year somebody came through and bought about 120 video games and took them up to somebody in Austin. If you can figure out who that is in Austin, you may find one. Most were supposedly fairly late model games (Buck Hunter, NFL Blitz, etc.) but there were supposed to be some "classic" games as well.

ken
 
Its just sad that people can't find dryer places to store their games. I got to see a mess like that first hand once in Rapid City, SD.

A guy my friend knew, had found a junk yard that had a bunch of games stored in some old buildings there. We drove up and met with the owner. He was one of those guys that thinks everything is worth about twice what its really worth. So he drags us around from building to building. Most had really bad roofs and the games always seemed to be sitting in the worst places.

There was a Mappy, Dragon's Lair, Sinistar, cabaret Omega Race, and a Red Baron sitting all by itself in a corner. All the games were at the very least damp, some were wet. All were missing some parts, except the Red Baron. It was complete and mostly dry. I'm only mentioning the games we managed to buy off the guy. There were more, but he either wouldn't sell them, or he wanted way too much, or they were hopeless.

He seemed to have a thing for taking out the speakers and losing the back panels. I ended up with the Sinistar, Omega Race, and Red Baron. The other guy bought the Mappy and my friend got the Dragon's Lair. I heard later that the guy that sold them, thought we ripped him off. He got $600 for four non-working, wet, stinky, water damaged games, with parts missing. I thought we payed too much. It took most of a year to dry them out and get rid of the smell.

There were a couple of other games worth mentioning. There was a soaking wet Target Zero and a cocktail Gun Fight. The Target Zero seemed intact. It was the first time I had seen one and I thought it was gigantic. Way to big to move. The Gun Fight was missing so many parts and looked so rough. We didn't even consider them worth messing with.

Like I said, I don't understand the mind set that allows things like this to happen. If he had just moved them over to an area with a better roof and put them up on some pallets (he had lots of those), then throw a tarp over the games. They would have been protected and worth more.
 
I don't need to, you just did. ;)

ken

PS: I didn't mention everything we picked up, like the 8 ball, the bezel sucker and the nasty lung infections we are about to come down with :eek:
 
Its just sad that people can't find dryer places to store their games. I got to see a mess like that first hand once in Rapid City, SD.

Like I said, I don't understand the mind set that allows things like this to happen. If he had just moved them over to an area with a better roof and put them up on some pallets (he had lots of those), then throw a tarp over the games. They would have been protected and worth more.

Well put. I don't understand it either. I counted over 20 pool tables that were ruined in those buildings. Not to mention all of the jukeboxes. If they had sold some of those off, the money would have paid for fixing the roof of a couple of those buildings and they could have moved the rest of the stuff in to a dry storage area.

As it is, it is just a wet, stinking disaster waiting for the bulldozer. And they probably won't pull anything out before they flatten the buildings.

[insert image of a sad Nolan Bushnell with a tear running down his cheek]

ken
 
i still want to go and strip all i can from all of those machines...that are about to fall to pieces. im just a gluttin for punishment..
 
So what was the story on the machines? How did they get so bad over time? Dang, that Pole Position look like it suffered from more than a leaky roof - it looks like it had been used as a boat! My heart sinks everytime I see pictures like these. Hopefully some things could be saved...
 
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