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

It’s getting harder and harder to come up with post titles. I finally got some painting done on Moon Patrol. I decided to paint the black parts first using Rustoleum Satin Black in a can. Here’s a pic after I masked off the sides with some blue painters tape and brown paper from Staples:

Here it is painted after about 4 light coats:

The light reflecting off the black makes it look a little screwy, but it doesn’t look like that in real life…just in the land of make believe. I didn’t go nuts painting the inside, but I did hit it a bit here and there…I figured it didn’t matter much because it won’t be seen.  I painted the back doors rested on nails against the garage wall…you can see one of them in the pic above.

I picked up the paint for the sides today at Home Depot, and will be painting them soon….I can hardly stand the excitement!

Hey there…my Moon Patrol restoration is coming along. I can’t wait to paint it. I have both sides ready for paint. The front is pretty much done, but I’m going to look it over one more time. I’m working on the back now, which is very close to being ready as well. I don’t have any pics of the cabinet because there isn’t much to see. I’ll take some when I start painting.

Wade Lanham had mentioned cleaning monitors and other parts with something called Bleche-Wite.

You can get it at most automotive stores. He gave me the low down on how to use it, and it is incredible. You spray it all over whatever you are cleaning, in this case my Moon Patrol monitor. Let it sit for a few minutes and use a soft paint brush to brush away dirt, then hose the whole thing down with a garden hose. You can then spray most of the water off using an air compressor with an air spraying nozzle attachment thingamajig, and let it fully dry before hooking it up.

Before pics:

After:

Thanks for the tip Wade!

That’s it for today. I’ll be heading out tomorrow to pickup something cool for the gameroom, but I won’t tell you what it is until I get back so I don’t jinx it.

Hey there. I’m going to make this post a tutorial.

In case you didn’t read the older posts in the Moon Patrol section, the Moon Patrol I’m restoring had water damage on the bottom of the cabinet. I cut away the damaged wood and added new pieces to replace it. The old wood looked like it was rounded off at the corners intentionally, so I rounded the new wood to match, and was pretty happy with the result.

A cruel individual who shall remain nameless (Wade Lanham) decided to comment on those rounded corners and informed me that they weren’t originally rounded. At that point, I had 3 corners rounded off, and was going to get to the 4th soon. I was thinking of just leaving them as is, but it was bothering me. I’m spending so much time trying to make this right, that it would suck big time to have those corners rounded when it’s complete. I decided to fix them. This method would work regardless of whether you screwed up a corner on purpose like myself, or if you had one that was broken off.

Materials and tools you will need:

• Bondo
  
• Putty Knife
  
• Sanding block and paper (80, 120)
  
• Orbital sander (optional, but better than spinning your sanding block around real fast)
  
• Hammer
  
• Finish nails – 1″ or so is probably fine
• Light Block (for mounting lights on vinyl siding)
  
• Ruler
  
• Hacksaw
  
• Jigsaw (optional…watch your fingers!)
  
• Drill and bits
  
• Motivation
  

OK…here goes. The light block is in two pieces that snap together. Separate the pieces. You’ll need the piece that looks like this:

OK…take a beer break….ready?….let’s continue….

The side shown in the pic is the side that goes against the siding, and we are going to use it as a mold for the bondo. Bondo will stick to just about everything, except plastic. You basically need to cut this in half so you have 2 corners. The best way is probably corner to corner. I did it a little different but would probably do it diagonally if I had to do it again. I started cutting with a jigsaw which was fast. The only problem is it will heat up the plastic and melt it, and it quickly bonds back together. I then had to score it with a utility knife to get it separated. After I cut mine, the two pieces looked like the one on the left here:

Ignore that clamp…I didn’t end up needing it.

There is no easy way to explain this part…you need to measure and cut more of the plastic corner so it will fit underneath the corner, as shown in this pic:

Once you get this cut so it fits well, you’ll need to secure it. I did this by drilling a small pilot hole in a few spots, and banging in a finish nail just enough to hold the corner tight. You can see some of the nails better here:

Read the directions on the can of Bondo until you have them memorized. Mix the bondo on something flat that you can throw out later (like that girl you met at the sports bar last night?). When you have the bondo mixed, spread it into the mold like you are making a cake. Be sure to push down enough so that it forces the bondo down to the bottom of the mold, and leave the bondo higher than the repair so you can sand it later.

If you mixed the bondo right, it should harden in about 30 mins. If you crush a viagra and mix it in, it usually hardens a bit quicker. Feel the bondo to make sure it’s solid, pull the nails out and the mold should come right off.

Now, hit the side with the orbital sander using 80 grit paper until it’s smooth. For the edges, you can either use the sanding block, or the orbital sander. If you use the orbital sander you can easily make it crooked if you aren’t careful. Count the number of beers you have left, and make your decision. Here is the finished result on my Moon Patrol.

[BOREDOM DISCLAIMER]: I’m going to apologize in advance for what you are about to read. It is bound to be pretty boring. I’m going to go through everything I did to my Moon Patrol PCB last night in hopes it might help me fix it down the road. Buckle your seatbelt, cuz we’re going in….

This is a continuation of my Moon Patrol saga…if you don’t want to miss any of the exciting details, you may want to back up a few posts.

My mailman arrived yesterday. I was expecting him, and had let my dog out early for his arrival (j/k…I don’t have a dog). You know how The Postman Always Rings Twice? Well at our house, it’s more like The Postman Never Rings, Not Even Once. We have a shiny new giant door bell that is very noticable, but it goes untouched. This guy is a knocker.

Now don’t get me wrong. I like knockers just as much as the next guy, but when I’m working at home I like to have the music on. Because he likes to knock softly like an old lady with sore knuckles, I have to keep the music turned down low. This is also annoying because sometimes he comes around 12:30, but other times not until it starts getting dark out. Anyways, enough ranting about the mail…here’s what came:

What could this be I wonder? I flipped it over, and took a close look at the customs declaration.

Now I remember! These are those electronic pants I ordered from the pants district in Beijing! I hope they fit!

I ripped the package open with visions of my lower half plugged into a power outlet, and was incredibly dissapointed to find 16 of these:

I only ordered 15, so I guess one is for good luck.

Remember that boredom disclaimer up top? OK…if you are still reading, here is where I may loose you. I popped 2 of these in, to replace the suspect RAM. There are only 2 RAM in Moon Patrol as far as I know. Hooked it all up, and the problem was still there. So…according to the manual, problems can also occur with logic chips that are in the RAM circuits. The first one they mention is a 74LS139 chip in spot 2K on the main CPU board. I have a logic probe that I have never used. I figured it would be a good time to try it out. Everybody remembers their first time with a logic probe…do you remember yours?

So…I hooked it up and probed away like one of those aliens from the book Communion. I read the data sheet for this chip that I found via Google, and thought maybe it wasn’t doing what it should. In retrospect, I think I just don’t know what I’m doing. I ended up swapping out this chip with one I had on an old board and it did squat.

Now, because I am clueless, my options here are limited. I started looking over all boards very closely on both sides. I was looking for broken traces, or anything else that stood out. I noticed on the Character board (part #M-52-B-C for those taking notes), pins 9 & 10 on the chip at location 8B had solder connecting them together.

I thought that was a bit odd, and looked up this chip in the schematic. While I don’t understand much about the circuit, It definitely looks like these pins are not supposed to be connected. So, I desoldered them and put the board back in the cabinet. Now, the original problem was still there in addition to a new one. Everything that was supposed to be black on screen was now blue. I soldered the pins back together and it didn’t fix that.

I noticed a repair on the bottom of the Scrolling Video board, under where the ribbon cable connector goes. There was a gouge going right through 2 traces and someone repaired that with 2 blue wires. What is weird is that if you follow the traces they are replacing, it looks like they accidentally ran each wire to the opposite location. I desoldered them and soldered them where I thought they should go, like so:

The board is pretty much dead. I’ve decided that I messed with it enough, and am going to buy one that I know is working. When I get a bit better with this stuff I may take a crack at fixing this one.

Final Score: Moon Patrol 3, Jamie 0.

I don’t have much new to report. My package from China didn’t arive yet. Bastards. They can deliver food to my door 5 minutes after I hang up the phone, but I guess the same doesn’t go for memory chips.

Moon Patrol is a 4 board PCB sandwich (why so much food in this post!?). The top board is for audio, and has a bunch of electrolytic capacitors on it, which usually start to wear out after 20 years or so.

I lieu of being able to change the memory chips, I decided to change all those capacitors. I actually had all the caps I needed for it finally, due to the assortment I ordered from eBay. It feels good to have the parts on hand to do repairs for a change.

Will the memory arrive tomorrow? Can you stand the excitement!? Will Batman & Robin escape the evil clutches of the Riddler??? Tune in next time to find out!

Happy Easter Eve! In just a few hours, the Easter bunny should be sliding down your chimney with lots of eggs for all the good girls and boys. Don’t forget to leave him a glass of milk and some carrot cake.

[INSERT CLEVER EASTER TO ARCADE SEQUE HERE]

When I got my free Moon Patrol project cabinet awhile back, I also got a game board for it for $20. I wasn’t sure if it worked, but the guy I got it from thought it did, if I rememer correctly. I’ve been wondering if it did for a long time. Because I’m not even close to being ready to actually hook it up in the cabinet (still need to finish repairing and painting it), I decided to try the board in my JAMMA cabinet. For those that aren’t arcade geeks, JAMMA is the wiring standard used by most games since around 1986 (I think). Moon Patrol was made in 1982, and is not compatible with JAMMA. I ordered a JAMMA adaptor starter kit from Bob Roberts.

I’ve never made a JAMMA adaptor before. It took me a long time to solder this sucker up last night…at least a couple of hours but I lost track of time. It was a thing of beauty, and probably would have brought a tear to your eye if you saw it up close.

The moment of truth came and I hooked it up. No video, audio, or any of the general coolness associated with Moon Patrol. After staring at the adaptor, the board, and the harness (isn’t that a C.S. Lewis novel?!), I finally realized that I totally screwed it up. The pins on Moon Patrol were pretty much a mirror image of what I had on the adaptor. I had to desolder every wire and start over. After finishing it today, here is the end result, showing both sides:

The first attempt was a bit neater, but at least this one is right. I hooked it up today, and found that the board was definitely not working 100%. It came up, but at least 50% of the characters in the phrases on screen were incorrect. For example, this should say PUSH BUTTON, 1 OR 2 PLAYERS:

It almost looks like it’s in a different language…maybe the one they speak on the moon. This screen should say BEGINNER COURSE GO!:

Note that you can see the tank in the image, but it is a bit garbled up with other flipped images. This screen actually came out pretty dark in the photo, but you could play the game for a few seconds at a time and most of the landscape and colors looked correct. It kept resetting in the middle of the game and acting all crazy like.

I did the typical things on this…made sure the voltage was OK, reseated all the socketed chips, etc…That didn’t do anything. I put it in test mode, and got a screen filled with garbage (kind of like my office area):

According to the manual, the first test is for the RAM. It should read something like “RAM OK…” or “RAM NG…”, followed by the RAM location. Now, if you take your time and look at the phrases in the other images, there is a method to the character madness. Each letter that is screwed up is actually 5 positions ahead of what it should be numerically. For example, BACIJJAR should be BEGINNER. The B is OK. If you count 5 spots from A (including A), you get an E. 5 from C is G. The I is OK. 5 from J is N, etc…

So, even though the screen reads “RAI JC”, I know it should say either “RAM OK” or “RAM NG”. I used the method above to determine that it actually reads “RAM NG”. So…I have bad RAM somewhere. Bad, bad, naugthy RAM. The memory location should come next, but I can’t make sense out of it. According to the manual, there are only 2 RAM chips, so I’m going to replace them both. I just ordered some on eBay, super cheap. They were $1 each. Most places have them for $3 or $4. I wanted to have extra for future use, so I bought 15. The only downside is they are coming from China and will take 7 to 10 business days to get here.

I’ll post again with the results of swapping the RAM. If you are familiar with this Moon Patrol problem as seen in the screenshots, please let me know. I’m really just guessing at this point.

Hey there…Happy New Year! Hope you had fun watching the ball drop, and by now are hopefully hangover free.

We started prepping one of our upstairs rooms so we can paint it tomorrow. We are turning it into an office for Linda (the wife unit). By doing that, we can move her computer upstairs, and make more room for games.
I spent a good part of yesterday and today working on Moon Patrol.

Here’s one side stripped of it’s Aliens sideart sticker and black paint:

The bottom of the cabinet had some pretty bad water damage:

I ended up having to put new wood along the bottom on 3 sides. Here it is as I was working on it…

Right side before:

Right side after patch:

You can’t see it in the pic above, but I nailed a cleat below this out of the same stock (1″ x 2″) so I would have something to nail this to (visible in the next pic).

The left side had water damage a bit higher up, so I had to use a 1″ x 3″.

Left side after cutting away the bad wood:

Because I had to cut more off of the left side, you’ll notice if you look carefully (click for larger pic) that the side of the cabinet is no longer attached to the bottom because the cut is higher than the bottom plywood. To add a little strength to this, I used dowels and some wood glue in this repair.

Left after patch:

There is a chunk missing from the new piece of wood on the left side of the above pic. It happened when I cut it, but doesn’t matter because it’s gonna be loaded up with Bondo anyway.

Front before:

Front after patch:

It was a little tricky cutting out the old wood for the front, because the sides stick out past it. I wanted something I could temporarily put over the front to sit the saw on top to make up the height, so the edges of the sides wouldn’t get in the way of the saw. I used the back door, as it is the exact same width, and made up the height perfectly. I then tacked a piece of 1 x 2 as a cutting guide through the door and the front of the cabinet, and cut almost all the way to the edge. I was able to cut the rest of the way using a utility knife and a chisel.

All 3 repairs, before Bondo:

The bottom of both sides are actually not perfectly square in the corners. The corners aren’t just rounded off. The whole bottom is slightly arched like a very crappy rocking chair. The cabinet before repairs actually did rock when the leg levers were off. Anyways…I held a piece of the side that I cutoff on top of each repair and drew the curve. I then hit it with the sander until I reached the line, and finished it with a sanding block. You can see it in the pic above for the front corners. I hadn’t done the back ones at that point.

Here’s one side completely sanded and slathered in Bondo.

I felt like I was decorating a cake with this stuff…. I wonder if Bondo comes in butter cream or double chocolate? (Oh God, I hope so!)