Second Pad

While waiting for a solution to the leg leveler problem on the 1P side, I decided to start cleaning the 2P side. Since I know have the tools to get things done the process was much, much faster. I have the pad completely torn down after only a few hours. There were a few screws that needed to be extracted with the drill, but everything else went smoothly. The leg levelers on this pad were a breeze. Two came out by hand and the others needed a wrench but they all came out without incident.

I'm still cleaning some of it up, and I will need to get some replacement screws for ones that are broken or lost, but I'm pretty happy with how things are going.

I also took a look inside the cabinet's front panel that houses the select and start buttons. I found the reason the two yellow left arrows were not functioning - the housings for the buttons were dangling inside the cabinet. I reattached them and this should fix the issue. I can't test it right now since everything is in pieces, but I expect to have this back in working order soon.

Cleaning and Leg Leveler Woes

I want to get rid of as much of the rust as possible on the interior metal components of the pad. I've tried using a combination of CLR and steel wool and I think it's had a pretty decent affect. This is what it looked after a few minutes of scrubbing:

Before:

After:

It's not like-new but it's a lot better so I'll probably be doing this for all of the rusted internals. All I do is splash it with some CLR, wait a few minutes, and scrub it under cold water with a steel wool pad.

I've also cleaned the L-bracket compartments of the left pad. For comparison, here is a shot of all four - three of which I've cleaned with one that I hadn't started yet:

These are pretty easy to clean. I just remove the screws and wipe the parts with paper towel and some all-purpose cleaner.

So far, the process of cleaning this thing out has been pretty positive with only a few small set-backs. Unfortunately, I've hit a road block. Many of the leg levelers and wheels on the pads are rusted, bent and in pretty bad shape. I'm going to be ordering replacements from ChannelBeat, but to replace them I first have to remove them. On the left pad, two of the leg levelers came off without any trouble at all. The other two were rusted tight and wouldn't budge.

I used a lof of WD-40 and some vice-grips but all I was doing was stripping the bolts. I tried finding other solutions for similar problems online and saw that there are some pin-ball machines with similar feet that people had trouble removing. I saw a recommendation for Liquid Wrench that worked for at least one guy, so I figured I'd try it. This stuff is similar to WD-40 but it also claims to cut through rust while being specifically made for seizures like I'm experiencing with these levelers.

I sprayed some on both sides of the screws holding the feet in place and let it soak for a few minutes. Afterwards I attached a small pipe to the end of my vice grips for extra leverage. After a lot of effort, I managed to get one of the legs off. I had to use all of me eight and spin the screw about three full turns before it really started to come loose.

The other one, sadly, still won't move at all. My last attempt snapped the vice grips and the bolt is getting majorly stripped. This is the leg leveler in question (taken before I started using the Liquid Wrench):

I'm kind of stuck on what to do here. I've read about bolt extractors (turbo sockets?) but in order for that to work I think I'll have to break the rubber foot and it's metal enclosure off the screw completely. Even after that, I'm not sure the socket will be able to reach the bolt. The leg is also in really deep, so if I decide to leave it in place it will actually be above the wheel making it pretty useless.

While I look for solutions I'm going to be continuing the cleaning and restoration of other pats of the machine. Maybe I need a blow torch...

Stage Screws

The stage is full of rusted and stripped screws. I managed to get many of them off with a normal screw driver and some of the tougher ones came loose with pliers. There were still several that wouldn't budge so I bought a drill (Black & Decker DR340B) and a screw extractor bit (#1), which has been working pretty great.

I'm starting with the left pad and I've removed nearly all of the stainless steel for cleaning. It seems that putting the stainless steel in the dishwasher gets it pretty clean. I set it to pots and pans. It doesn't get rid of any rust, but the dirt and grime comes off without needing to manually scrub it. For any remaining sticky residue, I use Goo Gone. For the rust, I'll probably try CLR although I've never used it before so I'm not sure yet.

Before dishwasher:

After dishwasher:

I'm also using a shop vac to grab this mess:

I'm disassembling the pad entirely and it's taking a lot of time. Surprisingly, there are very few screws missing on the L-brackets, but nearly every screw is rusted or in otherwise terrible shape so I'm ordering replacements.

Also, I managed to break the head off one of the screws holding an L-bracket. Luckily, a small bit of thread was over the metal so I was able to get it out with pliers. There were also two screws on the top of the pad that the screw extractor failed to grab, leaving circular, hollow heads. I took a hack saw and cut a slot into heads of the screws for a flt-head screwdriver, but twisting just chipped off more metal. One of them slowly made it out but the other nearly disintegrated. With a lot of patience I managed to finally get it out with some pliers and WD-40. I definitely need to replace all of the surface screws.

Trick Bars

I was really hoping the bars were wobbly because they just needed to be tightened, but once I opened up the back of the pad it looks like there is a bigger problem.

It seems that there are two small welds that have broken free from the bar. Actually, they are both broken on both pads, making it four in total. Luckily, I know someone with welding equipment that offered to help me out.

The bar and the plate don't actually separate, they are just a little loose. I can't see where else it might be connected, but I'm reasonably sure that the problem lies with these welds. The tricky part is... there are not many areas where the bar meets the plate, and in most of the areas where the two touch the top stainless steel plates need to lay flush with the red plate.

The bars insert into some holes in the stage for stabilization. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure the red plate needs to sit flush with the stage which means the existing welds are pretty much the only place I can connect the two.

The metal plate is otherwise in good shape. There are no missing bolts and nothing is terribly corroded, but it's filthy. I blew away debris with compressed air and wiped everything down with some multi-purpose cleaner.

DDR Get

I've recently acquired a Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine that's going in my basement. I bought it from an arcade/golf center and it's in pretty good working order, but it's totally filthy and is missing a bunch of screws.

After I bought it I had to get into my house. I have an access door going from my garage to my basement, but it's narrower than a standard sized door, which makes it difficult.

I don't have photos detailing how I got it in since it was a spur-of-the-moment-struggle type of thing, but basically I had to remove the marquee, detach the stage, and remove the coin door in the front of the cabinet which required disconnecting a lot of wire harnesses. When I take my access door off the hinges, I have exactly 2 feet of space available and the cabinet seems to be almost exactly 2 feet deep (from front to back) without the small coin door pieces jutting out (which is why I had to take the door off).

Generally, the wiring is setup intelligently. There are many color-coded and keyed molex connectors, so it wasn't hard for me to reconnect everything once I got it inside.

Here is what it looks like, partially reassembled:

Currently, two of the yellow select arrows on the cabinet are unresponsive (both left arrows) and pressing right seems to register twice on every hit. The stage arrows seem mostly fine, just not very sensitive. Both of the red trick bars are a little wobbly. The top left light on the marquee does not light, but all other lights seems to be working. Almost every screw on the surface is rusted and many are stripped. The umbilicus that protects the wire harness connecting the stage to the cabinet is gone and replaced with some shoddy tubing held together with zip ties.

One thing I lucked out on was the monitor. It seems the original was replaced with an M31 Series CGA/EGA/VGA Monitor (by Wei-Ya/Huai Electronics). This monitor claims to handle a standard VGA signal which is good since I want to connect this to a PC to make it a Stepmania machine in the future.