Sunday, June 28, 2009

Restoring Donkey Kong Jr. Part II

I finally installed the cap kit for the monitor. The scariest part was having to discharge the monitor before taking it out. You can really shock yourself if you don't know what you are doing. I was really nervous when I was doing it, but it turned out not to be that bad. Below is a picture of the monitor out of the cabinet.


Here is a picture of the monitor board before I replaced the capacitors. As you can see it was pretty dirty. I had never soldered anything before so it was a little nerve racking at first. Amy's dad Tom was here and helped me out by keeping track of all the capacitors and letting me know which ones went where. He was a real life saver!


Once the capacitors were all replaced, I put the monitor back in and flipped the switch. Everything came on with no problem. After a little bit of tweaking I got the image to come out perfect. As you can see the screen is nice and bright and there is no more fold over on the right hand side.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Restoring Donkey Kong Jr.

I Finally purchased an arcade game to restore. I got this beautiful machine at a pawn shop in Hampstead for only $120!

Cosmetically it is in great shape with only a few dings and scrapes. The major issues that it has is with the monitor. There is some fold over on the left side and a wave to the screen. Replacing the capacitors on the monitor's board should help correct this.


Here is a list of things that I have already done:

  • Cleaned the outside and inside of the machine.
  • Cleaned the control panel.
  • Took apart the joystick and cleaned it.
  • Cleaned the monitor.
  • Replaced the instruction card under the control panel overlay.
  • Replaced the light behind the marque.

The control panel overlay was in decent shape although the red was faded out the the title and in Mario's clothes. I will probably replace it at some point in time.



Here is a list of things that I still need to do:

  • Replace monitor caps.
  • Replace T molding.
  • Update power supply.
  • Replace control panel overlay.
  • Replace buttons.
  • Replace missing side art.