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That cabinet cleaned up pretty well. Did it happen to come from "Nickel Nickel" ?
thanks Mike.
No, the owner was up in North Hollywood area, and mentioned to me they were at a casino/hotel at some point in its life. He didn’t mention which one.
 
Gotcha. I suspect a huge lot of Aeros were imported to socal in the mid-90s. A lot of them have all the same ugly American control panel hackjobs and stretched marquee art, as well as the pedestals many of these were on.

When I visited Nickel Nickel in ~2018, there were twenty or so Aeros just like that. About half of them had vertical collapse or just had no monitor image, and they just... ran them like that.
 
Took a couple days before posting the last few tasks to be done (for now).

After bringing it into the house, I had to rearrange my office/game room to accomodate my new cab, so that took a bit of time to moving things around and hook-up everything again.

For the cabinet I finished off cleaning the wiring and re-populating it into the cabinet.
One of the things that bugs me in these japanese cabinets are these cable ties. They tend to lose their stickiness in the pads, so you have cables dangling around willy-nilly.
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I replaced the double sided foam tape on all the ones that were worn out and put them back into their original spots:
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Clean and organized:
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The rubber grommets came in, courtesy of @RandomRetro, which fit perfectly.
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I also repainted the black screws holding my monitor down. The darkness!:
QHYHlDWl.jpg


Here's pro-tip for people putting cabinets on carpet and want to be able to slide them around when re-positioning. When I used to play ice hockey, I used to get really bad blisters and calices on the bottom of my feet from my hockey skates. One of the tips that a teammate gave me was to tape my feet up with duct tape. Not kidding. The duck tape is not only strong and sticky enough to stay on your feet, but also reduces the friction inside your skates, lessening the amount of chafing and rubbing on your feet. This is a tip for hikers too, it greatly helps keep your feet from blistering.

I applied this same knowledge to the feet of my cabinet so I can slide it around on carpet if need be.

I only had white Duct tape on hand, Silver is the best because it has the more slippery contact, but this will do for now:
VU0pmA9l.jpg


Cut-off the exccess:
nfKbB0xl.jpg


Done, protected cabinet feet from blisters and calices ;)
TmwQOjOl.jpg



I put everything back together, but I still wasn't satisfied with the monitor. The convergence was off, and couldn't get it to align properly after fiddling with it for an hour:
bqzk3SVl.jpg


EiYOo0dl.jpg


Turned out it needed just a bit of a rejuv on the red gun, so I hit it once and saw those satisfying cleaning sparks in the neck, and was able to easily converge it after. Super sharp and better brightness/contrast now!
bdgjFHMl.jpg



I'm really happy with the way the monitor turned out. It's super nice, and my tracking reading show that the guns are still really healthy, so I should be able to get a few more decades out of this tube.

I wired everything back up, including the CP. I'm not going to show the wiring just yet because I wanna build a brand new harness for it. It's really hacked up, but I need it playable for tonight's stream.

Got everything back up and did some test runs with a couple oldschool favorites. Here are the glory pics:

pzZrVrOl.jpg


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I really love how the marquee light shines upwards into the topper, lighting up the flyer art i have in there:
KMzYrjXl.jpg


This concludes the bulk of the project.

A couple things left I want to do with it over the next few weeks are...:
1. New CP harness
2. Acquire a 1 player panel
3. Apply the CP art to the bare metal surround once it arrives from Gateninety
4. Re-solder a new Jamma loom onto the Sega fingerboard. @KaPH33n is right, these adapters are so short and frail, you can barely reach a mounted board. I got a fresh loom I can use till i do a proper JAMMA conversion later on.
5. Install an audio amp. not being able to adjust the volume outside of the game PCB sucks


I will be streaming from this fabulous cabinet tonight and giving a small tour of it. Feel free to pop-in and say hello!
6pm PST - https://www.twitch.tv/gillaxian


PS. the second cab has been wrapped and is on it's way to @RandomRetro! Look out for his restoration next!
xhtwVK0m.jpg
5Xr4tinm.jpg
 
4. Re-solder a new Jamma loom onto the Sega fingerboard. @KaPH33n is right, these adapters are so short and frail, you can barely reach a mounted board. I got a fresh loom I can use till i do a proper JAMMA conversion later on.
Why can't you use a jamma extension?

Looks gorgeous btw. Thanks for sharing these wonderful posts
 
Why can't you use a jamma extension?
it’s not that I can’t use it, it’s more that the cable is really short with no give, and I feel like I’m tugging on it too much when switching boards. Something I do a lot of, especially when streaming.
a longer adapter with more slack would be safer.
 
Where did you source your flyer artwork for the marquee? I am thinking of having some printed out.
 
wow. So a rejuvenator can help with convergence issues. Didn't know that!
 
wow. So a rejuvenator can help with convergence issues. Didn't know that!
A rejuvenation won't help with convergence. However, if focus is adjusted after, that may help a little bit in a roundabout way.
 
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Where did you source your flyer artwork for the marquee? I am thinking of having some printed out.
I just googled the highest resolution images I could find and copied them into photoshop and prepped them for printing (adjusted levels and contrast, saved out as pdf’s since Staples likes that file format).
since these are small 5x7 prints, the resolution doesn’t need to be too high for printing.

wow. So a rejuvenator can help with convergence issues. Didn't know that!
wow. So a rejuvenator can help with convergence issues. Didn't know that!
A rejuvenation won't help with convergence. However, if focus is adjusted after, that may help a little bit in a roundabout way.
mike’s right. My apologies, I should have elaborated more. My problem with getting the convergence dialled-in was mainly I couldn’t get a strong enough beam out of the red gun without cranking up the gain to a high output. This made it make the red gun shift slightly causing me to unable to focus the beam properly. After the rejuv the red was bright and more focused so I was able to pinpoint the position between as well as tweak with the focus pot on the flyback to really get it sharp.

Rejuv itself doesn’t fix convergence, it just helps get a brighter beam for you to work with.
 
Congrats! Epic and awesome, although my dreams are shattered with the duct tape revelation. Has nobody taught you about teflon coated leg levellers? :thumbsup:
 
Has nobody taught you about teflon coated leg levellers?
haha yeah I know about them. But I wanted to keep the original legs on. If I can find a way of securely fastening Teflon to these legs, I’d try that.
 
Haha I know everyone’s not a big fan of the duct tape, but it works! But...maybe I’ll look into a less ghetto solution X/
 
Nice job. One question I restaured my new net city with new paint. So how to clean it? I saw this microfiber is it good? What's product cleaner use?
https://www.amazon.fr/Meguiars-Gant...rrosserie&qid=1606439463&s=automotive&sr=1-11
you can probably use that microfibre and it should be safe to clean with.

For cleaning solutions, depends on what you’re cleaning. If it’s 30 year old grime, you’ll need something concentrated but not toxic or harmful to surfaces. This is why I use Simple Green. It gets the grime out bit is safe to use.

For light cleaning you could probably use a damp cloth and all purpose windex.
 
Small update, I got around to building a longer Aero City-to-JAMMA adapter using a spare NOS Sanwa JAMMA loom I have been holding onto for a long while.
This loom will eventually be used for the full JAMMA conversion I do to the cabinet in the future.
27kPSYFl.jpg

I pulled the fingerboard off the adapter that came with the Moon Patrol PCB and cleaned it as best I could.
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Started soldering the newer wires, following the pinout specified in the Aero City manual.
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...and Done!
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Now I don’t need to be struggling with that short original adapter. :thumbsup:
 
we’re at 99%!

I re-crimped a new and updated 1-player control panel harness with nicer QD’s and a joystick JST connector used on most modern joysticks now.

HiTdJe1l.jpg


Ended up Receiving an @alberto1225 repro panel, and I gotta say, this is the highest quality repro you’re going to find out there right now.

bdmlJ0nl.jpg


The Sega Logo and silver lines are reflective!!
nz9QH6fl.jpg

Incredible quality. The bottom is also very clean and reflective, plus the mounts are properly placed and gives you a lot of versatility in different mounting plates you can use. I highly recommend alberto’s panels!

APc3V4pl.jpg

I applied the surround overlay using my vinyl art technique when I restore wood cabs. Really easy to go on:
jjy950zl.jpg

I screwed up though. I should have painted the surround first to get the overlay to look brighter than the print. I didn’t realize the print was a bit translucent, so it took on a darker tone when it was applied to the bare metal.
bLmZwGAl.jpg

No matter, it doesn’t look too bad when on the cabinet.
added my choice of yellow controls with an oversized 45mm balltop (standard is 35mm dia)

eiMysItl.jpg


Wiring is a hellava lot cleaner than before:
H3a0A19l.jpg


I wanted a subtle bling to it, so I added a led start button to p1 and wires 5v up to it to power on.
TfoN6Anl.jpg

AND that’s about it!
zvrH0VLl.jpg


all that’s left is to get some wheels that are missing for the back of this thing, but I’d say this restoration is pretty much complete for now!

thanks to all that followed along. This is a glorious cabinet now.
 
we’re at 99%!

I re-crimped a new and updated 1-player control panel harness with nicer QD’s and a joystick JST connector used on most modern joysticks now.

HiTdJe1l.jpg


Ended up Receiving an @alberto1225 repro panel, and I gotta say, this is the highest quality repro you’re going to find out there right now.

bdmlJ0nl.jpg


The Sega Logo and silver lines are reflective!!
nz9QH6fl.jpg

Incredible quality. The bottom is also very clean and reflective, plus the mounts are properly placed and gives you a lot of versatility in different mounting plates you can use. I highly recommend alberto’s panels!

APc3V4pl.jpg

I applied the surround overlay using my vinyl art technique when I restore wood cabs. Really easy to go on:
jjy950zl.jpg

I screwed up though. I should have painted the surround first to get the overlay to look brighter than the print. I didn’t realize the print was a bit translucent, so it took on a darker tone when it was applied to the bare metal.
bLmZwGAl.jpg

No matter, it doesn’t look too bad when on the cabinet.
added my choice of yellow controls with an oversized 45mm balltop (standard is 35mm dia)

eiMysItl.jpg


Wiring is a hellava lot cleaner than before:
H3a0A19l.jpg


I wanted a subtle bling to it, so I added a led start button to p1 and wires 5v up to it to power on.
TfoN6Anl.jpg

AND that’s about it!
zvrH0VLl.jpg


all that’s left is to get some wheels that are missing for the back of this thing, but I’d say this restoration is pretty much complete for now!

thanks to all that followed along. This is a glorious cabinet now.
Glorious indeed! The Aero never really caught my eye but after seeing yours all done up I gotta say its been really growing on me!!
 
Wow this thread was such a fun read. Makes me want to give my Aero City some much needed TLC. I also got mine from SoCal and it was kind of a junk pile when I picked it up. It's still kind of a pile, but it's at least a working pile right now.
 
Wow this thread was such a fun read. Makes me want to give my Aero City some much needed TLC. I also got mine from SoCal and it was kind of a junk pile when I picked it up. It's still kind of a pile, but it's at least a working pile right now.
I am about to dive in on my restore. New year resolution Milo, get’r’done!
 
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