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Crusty Astro City restore- work in progress

Gilluspe

Gilluspe

Student
Joined
Nov 5, 2024
Messages
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Location
New York, USA
As the title states, picked up a very beat up/rundown/smoke stained astro city, about a month ago. At some point it was exported from japan to china and spent the end of its life at a City Hero arcade. So to start, here is what i'm working with:

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They tried to repair the crack on this side but not the other...

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No ballast for me i guess. because china, they pulled the whole assembly and replaced it with one expecting 220v

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At some point, the front was color matched (poorly) the nicotine stained yellow color of the cab and this is the result:

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Also, the monitor was out for shipping and since i was planning to tear the whole thing down no need to reinstall it at this point.
 
Time for the teardown and first pass at cleaning, because gross is an understatement

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Remember kids, smoking is bad. This is the original coin bin next to a new one...
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Dont forget to catalog your fasteners:
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probably the worst jamma harness i've ever seen too. but anyway its now disassembled and everything is ready for a scrub

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cleaned up the shell with super clean and a garden hose and now i know what i'm working with.

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The back is good enough so wont need to respray that. With some repro side graphics it should be good to go. plus i do want to leave the original stickers intact. so i was happy it cleaned up as nicely as it did on the first pass.

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The front half of the shell is a different story. I confirmed whatever paint/color is on the front will not come off with a simple clean, so clearly this is going to need to be resprayed in its entirety after the fiberglass fixes are done.

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monitor woes.

After I got the cab home I tested the monitor just to be sure it still worked, and it did. However, because I was moving it around it needed a degauss and that's where my troubles started. The degauss button didnt work. So I started poking around and realized the degauss coil was not connected. No big deal right? well, when i went to plug it in, it had the wrong connector.

Turns out this cab has an MS9 Chassis but with an MS8 Toshiba tube and yoke.

Now the hunt for an MS9 yoke begins.
 
Awesome work so far! If you haven't already, try using a heavy degreaser (Purple Power or any equivalent) on the smoke/nicotine stains. It should easily melt that crud right off of most surfaces. That was something I wish I knew early on when I was going to town on my cab with stuff like Magic Erasers, which didn't do nearly as good of a job.
 
Yup, appreciate the heads up. 'super clean' is a de-greaser in that family. Watching the nicotine/tar run off with a hose is quite satisfying. Still needs a bit of spot cleaning but the shell wont give my fingers lung cancer by touching it anymore at least.

Currently I have the front metal panels in an acid bath to remove rust/the weird colored paint. will post an update once that's finished
 
Ok so I cleaned up the metal pieces. Removed all the rust and weird paint. They're down to bare metal and ready to be prepped for paint. Too bad I probably won't get around to painting them any time soon, but progress none the less.

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I ended up acid bathing them to get to this point, just a simple solution of vinegar and salt did the job, definitely wasn't the fastest though

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While huntng for the ms9 yoke to finish the ms8.5 swap, (aka the tube I got with the astro) I somehow ended up another ms9 instead.

I believe this one has something wrong with the chassis psu. But hey I'm bound to get at least 1 working ms9 out of this.. right right?

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Also, I did source an ms9 yoke, but from questionable sources. So who has recommendations on an inductance multimeter?

Edit: some lore for anyone in the New England region, I traced this tube back to running Espgaluda at TGA back in the day.
 
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It's been a while but, CRT update.
The yoke swap was a success and I now have horizontal controls.

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Yes it's still slightly crooked, convergence is off, and it needs a degauss (waiting on the connector in the mail), but I'm going to take my time to tweak those since I can't really do the shell fiberglass repairs until spring.

Also on par with the rest of this cab, the ms8 yoke was gross:

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Edit: i broke a 4.7k pot while making adjustments :(. replacement ordered but still inconvenient
 
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