Jolt Country

Sucky is when you go to move your arcade games and discover that your building has been leaking water on some of them and has ruined at least three of them.

RIP Bucky O'Hare, RoadBlasters, and Robocop. You did your best in defending the universe, keeping the roads safe in your search of fuel, and following your prime directives, but in the end you all succumbed to a little bit of rainwater.

Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shit, how are the boards? Are the boards salvagable??!

nooooooooooooooooooooooooo

I think electronically, all is okay.

Most of my machines on that wall had the backs off of them. The water must've leaked through the roof on that side and dripped down. That ended up soaking (a) the backs of the machines, and (b) the tops of the machines. Had the backs been on it probably wouldn't have been so bad. Instead, what got wet was the exposed sides of the back piece and the exposed parts of the back of the cabinet. Had the backs been on the machines I think the water would have rolled down and off of the painted parts of the cabinet. Instead, the exposed areas of MDF slurped up every last drop of water.

When I picked up the back to Bucky O'Hare, I knew something was wrong. One side was twice as thick as the other. It was also wet and mushy. I didn't realize how swollen it was until I tried putting it back on to the back of the machine and discovered it wouldn't fit in the machine. I thought I might be able to hammer it in. You can probably see this coming. Hitting the wood felt like hitting a slightly stale piece of bread. The hammer knocked a giant chunk of wood off where I hit it, and another piece came off near the bottom where it was sitting on the ledge of the back opening.

I recently discovered that my Bucky O'Hare board is a fairly valuable one. I guess most of them were made for a 4 player cabinet (a'la X-Men or TMNT), where each coin slot controlled one specific character. Mine is made for a two-player cabinet, so when you coin up you can pick which character you want to play. I checked online and a PCB like mine recently sold for almost $200, which is what I was going to sell the entire cabinet for, so ... I mean, financially? It'll be okay. The reality is, I'm going to have to start stripping parts out of cabinets, selling parts, and figuring out a way to dispose of cabinets.

Yes, cabinets -- plural. After I got over the initial shock of finding Bucky O'Hare wet and bloated, I moved to RoadBlasters, which I found was pretty much in the same condition. The back looked pretty funny. The sides where the t-molding was so swollen that ... you know how t-molding is the same width as the side wood? On this one there was 1/4 to 1/2 inch of wood, then the t-molding, then another 1/4 to 1/2 inch of wood. It's so fat now. Like the other one, the back to the game just crumbled when I tried to pick it up. I tried to reattach it to the back with screws and the screws just went through the wood. It would be like trying to drill screws into a marshmallow.

I went ahead and moved them all because I had to get them off the property (today's closing day). I guess this weekend I'll play the cabinet shuffle and move stuff back and forth to see what works and what doesn't (the storage unit they're in doesn't have electricity). For the ones that are toast I'll just start stripping them. The real issue I see is monitors. I don't know how to sell them online (packing and shipping them I'm guessing would be a bear). I'll try locally but ... sigh. We'll see what happens.

I have a blog post pending about all of this called "Foreclosure of a Dream". Cue Megadeth riff.

That sucks about the games, but as a man of action I am here to provide spooky action from a distance.

If the cabs are shot, fuck 'em - water damage is almost impossible to salvage. If they were Quantum or Food Fight cabs then that's one thing, but I give you Internet Guilt-Free Permission to strip those three cabs and sell them.

(Actually, I don't know enough about O'Hare and I don't have Invading Spaces nearby to know if that's a custom cab.)

Flack, you did the best you could to hold those games, but get your money from the Bucky O'Hare PCB. Ask for 10% more than you want and then figure it will be $35 to ship it. I guarantee you will sell that board on KLOV.

If Robocop is JAMMA I'll buy that board. Every fiber of my being wants to buy the Road Blasters parts from you, but shit, there are guys in Denver with multiple Road Blasters cabs and monitors and all that other stuff and I have no room, so I am staying out of it. That leaves us with....

Monitors. MONITORS. Nobody wants to ship that shit. ESPECIALLY this time of year. A KLOV post should get you $200 - $300 for each of those monitors.

You fought the good fight but water got in, swelling the cabs. It's your turn to finally turn a profit. It's your turn to finally clean up. I'll help you any way I can.

I don't think Bucky O'Hare came in a dedicated cabinet, but I could be wrong. I just went to KLOV to check and someone uploaded a picture of mine which is in a black and green Bally Sente cabinet.

Jeff's coming over Friday night and the two of us are going to start stripping down cabinets and seeing what we can salvage and what we can sell.

My last blog post came off a bit more depressing than I intended. Jeff came over Friday night and gave me the kick in the pants I needed. He has a gift of being able to look at a big project and break it up into bite-size chunks, and he did just that. "Sell these, fix these, part out these." He's really good at that.

I saw an old rerun episode of American Pickers last week. In it, one of the guys bought an old metal sign. All parties involved agreed that it was rusty and in pretty bad shape. Later in the show, the guy admitted that the sign was in bad shape, but that everybody starts collecting somewhere, so this was an entry level purchase for somebody just starting out a collection.

That one little comment helped me put a lot of things in perspective. Not everybody is looking for a thousand dollar game that's fully restored. Some people are still looking for their first game, one for a couple hundred bucks that they can fix up (or not).

So far I sold Ms. Pac-Man, and tentatively X-Men (4 player) and Ultimately Mortal Kombat 3. Part of Jeff's advice was to get the ones that are working 100% out the door.

I got my Buster Bros. 95% converted over to a 48-in-1. I already had the PCB and I'm running it through an old PC monitor. I paid $50 for the cabinet (working) and have another $100 in the PCB so ... $150 in, and I'm going to ask $500 for it. There are Multicades all over CL right now for $800-$1,200, so I think at $500 I can say, "here's a fixer-upper, paint it whatever color you like." We'll see how that approach goes.

The absolute destruction of cabinets would/will be a last case scenario. Hell, I'd rather give some of them away than destroy them. I've got one guy who wants to build a MAME cabinet -- I told him to come over and pick which one he wants.

I listed a couple on Craigslist and got 0 bites. The three I've sold were all through Facebook, but you have to think that resource is going to be limited. Someone mentioned posting some for sale signs out here at work so, that's an option.

Right now, I'm looking for options. :)

I'll let you know about the Robocop soon. The cabinet is a good candidate for a 48-in-1 if I can rotate the monitor. My contact is getting me 60-in-1 boards for (I think) $80 locally so if I can come out a little ahead by converting some of these already Frankencabinets, it'll be a good day.