Today, when I first went out I retrieved a few metal pieces I had left in the vinegar bath overnight. It was amazing how the vinegar did pretty much all the work to get those brown stains off the metal. Here is what it looked like when I removed the lid from the vinegar bin. You can see a lot of corrosive sediment that just fell off the metal overnight. I removed all the pieces and lightly brushed them, rinsed with water, and brought them inside.
Sometimes, I've noticed that once the metal has been cleaned with vinegar it has the tendency to re-rust if you don't give it some protection, so I pulled out this container I have of
Nevr Dull metal polish and rubbed that into the metal. It did a really nice job. I left it for a while and then wiped off any residue with a lintless cloth.
It's hard to imagine that these metals were originally this color. I was so impressed by how they came out, I went ahead and removed any and all remaining metal pieces from the fiberglass shell to give them the same overnight vinegar treatment.
Once that was done, I pulled the PSU out and disassembled that.
I know one side contains the amplifier and the other is the power supply board, but I'm not entirely certain which is which at this point. My guess would be that the side with the smaller white connectors is the amp. As usual, everything is showing signs of age. For now, I'm only going to clean this, replace the fan with the Noctua, and re-assemble it. But, I went ahead and bought cap kits for the amp, filter, and PSU from arcadepartsandrepair.com so I can do that whenever. Its convenient that the PSU just slides out of the arcade so easily.
I looked into various ways to just remove the pins from the fan and move them over to the Noctua but decided it would be too much work. So, just snipped, stripped, and soldered the old connector to the
Noctua NF-A8 ULN fan. After adding some colorful heat shrink and cinching it up, it was good to go.
Last thing before calling it good for today was to take some of the PSU panels and the remaining metal parts and leave them in the vinegar tub. Hopefully, by the morning all the rust and corrosion will magically be gone.