Thanks for your positive comments, much appreciated! I've been quite busy with the machine yesterday.
The rocket launcher assembly with the chain drive removed, including all gears etc.. No way to get this one clean without removing everything first. Note to self: always take a lot of pictures when taking things apart. I've had a hard time reassembling things due to a lack of photos
.
While cleaning the base, the gears and the chain get a good bathing in nitromethane (take care though! Three of the gears are made of plastic, you obviosuly want to keep these away from the nitro stuff!).
With everything cleaned up, I then reassambled the launcher unit. It's moving much easier now. Btw., as Midway seems to have stuck to combining plastic and metal in the chain drive (the metal gears use plastic shafts and vice versa), I've refrained from using any lubricant, following Clay Harrell's advice in his excellent guide to EM repair:
http://www.pinrepair.com/em/index1.htm#lubeNow up for some more cleaning: the projection screen ....
... and the plastic landscape, both used to knit together the landscape and flying planes via SAMIs semi-permeable mirror.
Both cleaned up really well, so let's finally unwrap the projection unit I've sourced via KLOV:
Looks clean and complete, but it seems the base plate got damaged during shipping:
Well, let's temporarily fix that with some bondo, and replace the plate properly next week.
Having everything cleaned and reassembled, SAMI is already looking much better now
... but it's looking even cooler with the blacklight/UV neon on, that's used to light up the landscape during gameplay:
As you can probably tell by the last picture, I've ended up yesterday with turning on the game for the very first time since I own it:
- Checked all the fuses and the sockets: looking good.
- Replace power chord because it got tasted by some rodents over the years (at least that's what it looks like): ok, done
- Quickly go over the relay contacts with my DMM to see if they are making proper contact when closed: checked.
- Cross fingers, power on game and trigger coin mech:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k37lJevhOi0As you can see, the game is basically running and behaving as it should. Of course, there's still a lot of stuff to do:
- Replace projector baseplate
- Rebuild or replace projector fan, as it's really noisy.
- The gun position to the utmost right is not registering hits
- The electronic soundboard needs new caps - lot's of static noises.
- The cabinet outside is still very rough and dirty.
Cheers,
Martin
