We have an historical cemetery in the back yard. It is incredibly overgrown with thorns and weeds to the point that you couldn’t even see one bit of it. There is a revolutionary war veteran buried there. Every year before Memorial Day a volunteer comes to put a flag on his grave. The town doesn’t take care of it. I figured I better clean it up so he could get in there. I mentioned it to my sister, and she and her 4 kids came to help clean it up. They brought my Grandfather who is a WWII vet. I still have a lot more cleanup to do, but you can finally get in there now. Here are some pics.

In Memory of DEACON EZEKIEL GAVIT who died Sept. 12, 1825. Aged 85 years.

In Memory of PHEBE, wife of Dea. Ezekiel Gavit, who died June 7 1836 in her 88th year.

In Memory of HANNAH GAVIT. Daughter of Ezekiel and Phebe Gavit, who died Feb 7 1826, age 57.

There are supposedly a total of 16 graves in the cemetery, but most aren’t marked. The Ezekiel Gavit with the flag on his grave is probably the 3rd . His grandfather owned an inn somewhere on this property that used to be used for town meetings in Westerly RI before they built an official town hall. I’m not sure if he is buried here or not. There are 2 other stones visibile that don’t seem to have any markings on them anymore:

My sister did some reasearch on the names, and is pretty sure that her husband’s family is related to the people in this cemetery!

I just picked up a project Mappy from Pete in Mass. I spotted it in an ad he put in the RGVAC newsgroup. There is a lot of great information on Mappy over at Mappyland, where I got the animated gifs above.

After I saw and played Mappy at Funspot in NH a few months back, I kept my eye out for one. I love the art on the cabinet, and the game is a lot of fun. I’ll give you some pics below and describe the condition it’s in so you can see what I’m up against with this one.

The sideart on one side (the right) is very good. The left side is decent, but has a section about 3″x3″ that is torn off. It’s in a spot that is mostly black, so I may be able to paint it to make it less noticable.

The control panel is pretty beat up:

The stickers on the front are in good shape

The bezel is just about perfect.

There is a gaping hole where the monitor once lived:

Pete gave me a broken one that I can hopefully fix and use for it. The game board works, so once I fix the cabinet and the monitor I should be able to get it going, after I do some bonding with my friend Elmer.

The left side of the cabinet is coming off…

I’ll have to clamp and glue it, and may need to cut some wood away and replace it. I won’t really know until I look it over better. There is also a piece of wood that goes above the control panel that’s broken off that will require some more glue. BTW…what’s with the cow on the Elmer’s glue label!? I hope they don’t melt down cows at the glue factory, as I couldn’t live with myself knowing Mappy was held together by the liquified remains of our departed bovine buddies.

Here is a cool arcade related video someone put together:

http://www.habosarcade.com/Media/Misc/MAME%20Jump.swf

I made some more progress on Moon Patrol. While some of the things I’m doing now may seem a little out of order, I’m doing them that way because I’m waiting to save a little money for the parts I need.

OK…check out the nasty speaker board this game came with:

Where do I begin. Let’s start with the bare wood. That should be covered with speaker cloth. Then there is that unsightly metal vent crap that they’ve screwed over the speaker hole. I think I just threw up a little. Based on some recommendations in posts in the RGVAC newsgroup, I headed to Ace Hardware to look for some special heavy duty replacement screen material called “Paw Proof”. It is designed to keep these from ripping your screens to shreds:

I couldn’t find one specifically with that brand name, but I did find a roll of what must have been the same stuff. It was $3.49 a foot, and came in a 36″ roll. I bought 4′ to have some extra. Here it is after I sprayed the board with some black rustoleum and covered it with the screen:

I just folded it over the back and stapled it. I really like the way it came out. Thanks go to whomever suggested that material.

I started wiring up the cabinet. I installed a new marquee light, the marquee, a switcher, and a custom wiring harness that I put together. Here are some picks of the back. Keep in mind it’s not done, and I need to vaccuum out the inside a bit.

If you’ve been reading my other posts, you may be wondering if that monitor will work after I hosed it down with a garden hose. I hooked it up, and it was deader than a door nail. It turned out that the fuse 601 was blown, so the problem had nothing to do with my heavy duty cleaning. I messed around with the monitor, trying to figure out the best way to mount it. This was clearly not the original monitor. This one is a Kortek KTA-915, and was designed to be mounted vertically. I was able to situate it in a spot so that the back door should just barely close, and the bezel around front should just barely fit. Before I went through the effort of trying to mount the monitor, I wanted to make sure it was going to work.

My wife got me a set of Randy Fromm DVDs and his big blue book. He has monitor flow charts to help troubleshooting monitor problems. According to the one for this monitor, if fuse 601 is blown, it is usually due to someone hooking it up without an isolation transformer (more than meets the eye). It said that when this happens, the bridge rectifier may be shorted. I tested it, and it didn’t seem to test right. I pulled it out of circuit and it tested fine so it went back in. He also says to check capacitor 602 for a short, but it wasn’t shorted. So, the problem may actually just be a fuse. I didn’t have one that fit, so I ran to Ratshack expecting them not to have it, and expecting them to try to sell me a cellphone. I was very shocked to find that they actually had the right fuse, and didn’t even ask for my name or phone number when I checked out.

I put the fuse in, did a cap kit, and it fired right up! Here it is from the front.

I was able to play a few games by touching the control panel wires together. It should be a lot easier to play once I actually have a joystick and buttons hooked up.

Stay tuned for the next exciting installment…

I finally finished painting! Check it out:

In case you forgot what this puppy looked like before:

I still have lots left to do, but it feels good to actually see it look like a Moon Patrol again. The method I used to clean up the drips with Goof Off worked pretty good. I ended up using Mr. Clean Magic Erasers instead of a rag and a ton of Goof Off. By the time I was done, I think I was starting to hallucinate. I sprayed the Goof Off on the sponge, and wiped gently trying not to rub the edge of the stencil more than I had to. The paint started to smear at first and made quite a mess, but came completely off after I kept going over it. The vinyl stencil held up pretty good while doing that, but did start to lift a little in just a couple of spots where I probably scrubbed too much. Because of the screw up, the edges on the yellow layer look a bit harder than they should.

They almost look like stickers, but I think it still looks good. There are a couple of spots that I want to touch up with a brush.

One nice bonus…the stencils came with registration mark stickers for the Williams logo:

I let Linda put those stickers on, so she gets credit for finishing it. I have to order the control panel overlay and t-molding so it will be a little longer before it’s done.

I found a video today that seems appropriate to end this post, seeing as this has now returned to a Moon Patrol (well….almost!) and we are going to be returning to the moon soon:

Saturday was our 2nd wedding anniversary. For those that don’t know, we got married in Vegas on 5/5/5, which is why the Skeeball sign we made has that impossible score:

We got up early and took the boat out Yard Sale-ing. We picked up some stuffed animals to add to our crane, and this:

I have to buy a sequencer to put in it so it will go from green to yellow to red.

After we were done yard sale-ing, we went to the movies to see Invisible.

The move was pretty good, but what was weird was there was one part in the trailer that wasn’t in the movie. If you watch the video above to about 1:20, you’ll see the main character look up towards a window and look at some old guy. Later they show him talking to him, and you get the impression that he’s a ghost. This is one of the things that made me want to see the movie, and that guy was nowhere to be found in it. It seems to me that they shouldn’t be allowed to use scenes in a trailer that don’t make it into a movie, but maybe I’m just being picky.

Quick update on Moon Patrol…I finally got all the sections of the stencil that dripped down to bare wood, and painted it with 2 coats of primer. Tomorrow I’ll paint it with the blue base coat and hopefully yellow if there is enough time for the blue to dry…cross your fingers that I can keep the drips at bay.

Hey there, hi there, ho there. It’s getting a little late, and the fumes are getting to me, so I apologize if I get a little weird on you. The good news is I started painting Moon Patrol! The bad news is that I gaffed it up pretty good. Here’s how it went down…

I bought my stencils from prOk aka Brian aka OleszakCreative.com. I couldn’t be happier with them. I was going to use paint codes I found on his site, but for some reason (cuz they suck?) my Home Depot couldn’t use them. I ended up grabbing the colors from a pic I took of the cabinet after I peeled off the old Aliens sticker.

I used the eyedropper in photoshop to grab the colors and printed them out in squares for them to match. This can’t possibly be very accurate but was the only way I could get them close, and they seem to match pretty good from what I can tell so far. The paint I got was semi-gloss latex enamel, and I also picked up Kilz-2 primer and a HVLP spray gun.

OK…so I had everything ready to go. I thinned the paint pretty good with water until it tasted just right, and still had a tough time getting it to come out of the sprayer well. I kept messing with it and it just didn’t seem right. I finally got it to come out somewhat decent but the height of the spray area was pretty small. Here it is after the primer:

I did 2 coats of primer. If I didn’t have problems with my shiny new spray gun, I probably could have done just one. I started the blue next, and did a couple of coats, sanding in between with 220 grit paper, and it just didn’t look right. It looked a bit stripey. I had a feeling it was my gun, so I poked around on the interweb for a while, and finally found the problem. An HVLP gun is designed to be used with a compressor that has a large tank. My measley 6 gallon compressor wouldn’t cut it. I cleaned up the gun and brought it back to Home Depot, not telling them that I painted all day with it. I bought a standard duty gun, and the difference was night and day. It worked about a million times better than the other one with my tiny compressor. After doing another coat of blue with the correct gun, it looked like this:

The finish looked awesome, and I was psyched. I moved on to the stencils. Here is the dark blue after being taped in place:

After the mask is peeled:

After I masked off the rest with tape and paper:

And finally after painting 2 coats and peeling the stencil off:

The stencil worked great, and it looked very cool. It was realy starting to look like a Moon Patrol again, and the excitement of seeing it finished probably lead to what came next.

OK…so here it is with the stencil for the yellow on, ready for paint:

I did a single light coat of yellow, and it looked pretty good. You are supposed to wait 4 hours between coats with this paint. I don’t remember exactly, but I think I only waited about 2.5. By this time, it was getting a little colder outside and was dark. I did the 2nd coat, and it looked good. Went back inside for a few hours, and went back in the garage to checkout my handy work.

I had drips! Drips everywhere. As Q*bert would say, @!#?@!

I’m not sure what caused the drips. I guess maybe that last coat was too heavy, or I didn’t wait long enough, or someone is out to get me. Not every piece that is cutout had drips…if I had to give a number, I’d say 50% of the individual cutout shapes had drips and the other half did not. I was going to try to sand them off, but figured that would be difficlut and mess up the stencil. I think I found a good solution to this, but won’t know until it’s all done.

I tested with some scrap pieces of the vinyl from the first color on the board that I was using to test my spray gun. I stuck it down good, and went at the areas along it’s edges with Goof Off. I was very careful to not rub too hard near the edges of the vinyl, but just enough to get the paint off, down to bare wood. I peeled the vinyl off and it left all the paint under it in tact. So, I have to do that to every piece on the stencil that has severe drippage. I masked off every individual cutout that didn’t have drips:

Here is a closeup of how it looks with all the paint removed:

While it may look like total crap around the edges of the stencil, it’s still stuck down well and the inside is clean and smooth. I have a lot of work to do to get it all like this. When I’m done, I’m going to paint these spots again, with primer, the base coat, and finally yellow. I could just use yellow on the bare wood, but I’m concerned that the letters masked off won’t match these fixed ones.

I have a truckload of Goof Off, rags, and have sealed every window and door tight so the outside air doesn’t get in. Wish me luck!

TO BE CONTINUED