Four Monitors and an Update
The end of Spring and the beginning of Summer is typically a pretty busy time for me… and that did not change this year. The weather was fantastic for working out in the garagecade right up to July 3rd… starting with Independence Day, it’s not been below 95 degrees here with 9 of the last 20 days being above 100 degrees. Yeah, it’s hot, and as such, even with the insulation, the garagecade is hovering around 85 degrees. I really do want to come up with a permanent solution for cooling out there, however it’s going to cost more money than I have right now…
That said, I did manage to get a few things accomplished BEFORE the hot weather set in. Wizard of Wor has been suffering with a bad monitor tube for quite some time… and I’ve been on the lookout for a 19″ CRT for a reasonable price since then. I finally found one! Actually… i found FOUR! A local OP posted what was advertised as 4 Wells-Gardner 19″ working pull-outs from video poker machines. The op lives about 2 miles from my place (I’d done a deal or two with him prior) so i dropped by. I was presented with 4 Vision Pro CRT’s of varying degree of burn-in. The best case monitor was BARELY burned… it takes a little effort to find it. The other three range from a little burned to a little more burned. Nothing too bad and they’d make perfect replacements for and game that uses tinted plexiglass. I went over with the mindset I’d pick up at least one and I ended up coming home with all four monitors. After testing, all four did, indeed, work. They all exhibited significant enough issues, however, to warrant a re-cap. I picked up 4 cap kits and re-capped all four.
I decided to re-cap all the chassis at the same time then test them afterward. I ended up with 3 of the 4 chassis working great with all issues exhibited prior now rectified… leaving me with one monitor that is exhibiting sync issues. I have yet to go back over my work on that particular chassis, but it’s queued up for when the temperatures drop. There is no rush as I have no game to put the monitor in.. and I have one other working monitor sitting in the shed waiting for a game as well. The other two monitors ended up going in to the Wizard of Wor, to replace Frankenstein’s Monitor that was in that bad boy (to read about Frankenstein’s Monitor… the monitor with not one, not two, but THREE yokes, be sure to read the Wizard of Wor post HERE.). The other went in to the Multipede cabinet to replace the much-burned-in Electrohome G07 that is now sitting in the shed waiting for the time I can find a tube I can use to replace the burned in glass it has currently. It’s sort of nice knowing that I have a monitor on hand that I can drop in to a cabinet should I come across that great deal that has a game with a bunk monitor.
Next on the agenda is to get that last monitor up and running. I also need to pull the Lethal Weapon 3 pinball glass off and replace the drop targets up the center. I’ve had the new targets for, literally, three years or more… but just haven’t gotten around to doing it. I think it’s because I know that I won’t be able to just open her up and replace the targets. I’ll also have to do at LEAST a quickie-shop job, which still takes more time than I care to put in to the game right now when it “works” as is… though one of the current targets is down to just a “nub”! I also need to pull the Multi-Pac out. I have a Bob Roberts vertical size adjustment cap kit I picked up YEARS ago to put on it… as it’s currently simply too wide of a screen to fit on the tube. I think I may put that in front of getting that Vision Pro up and running as it’s been a little pain in my ass going on years now. 🙂
Most likely none of this will happen until September, or close to it. July and August are just … hot … and this year it’s been just constantly so (yes, I know the guys from Arizona, Nevada, Texas, etc. are laughing at my “quite nice” 95-101 degree temps, but I digress). Until then, game on!