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.