What's new

Warehouse Full of Cabs — Looking for Parts & Restoration Advice

F

FatimahFatCakes

Beginner
Joined
Feb 15, 2022
Messages
11
Reaction score
23
Location
Australia
Hello Arcade Projects,

After some years of not looking around this forum, I’m once again amazed by how active and knowledgeable the community here is. I had a great experience in the past selling a Mahou Daisakusen PCB to a member named Swirl (hope you’re still active here!).

We used operate in the arcade industry and have warehouse full of old arcade cabinets that we are planning to restore. We’ve managed to bring several of them back to life, but many are still missing CRT chassis, PCBs, and cable harnesses. I recently visited Japan and tried to source these parts locally, but had no luck — and many of my old supplier contacts are no longer active.

I’d really appreciate any advice or pointers on where to look for these parts — whether suppliers, trusted sellers, or threads within this forum that might help.

I’m still learning my way around the different sections of the forum and don’t yet have a perfect grasp of where everything is, so please excuse me if I’ve posted this in the wrong area. Any guidance is welcome.

Thank you!


IMG20251022141325.jpg
IMG20251022141330.jpg
IMG20251022141349.jpg
IMG20251022141416.jpg
IMG20251022141428.jpg
IMG20251022141802.jpg
IMG20251022141816.jpg
IMG20251022141837.jpg
 
That's a lifetime of projects there, and then some!

Left side of my brain gets excited, the ride side of my brain gets exhausted looking at all those machines.

What a stash.
 
Wow, so many great games!

Hopefully you can get as many of them running as you can and you can find new homes for the ones you can't!
 
The biggest of all the big questions: Is there a working Planet Harriers among them?

Awesome place!
 
Whats your goal here, personal collection or opening an arcade? If it were me, I'd evaluate what machines can actually be restored in a reasonable amount of time, pick my favorites out of those and flip the rest. Even selling what you don't want looks like a full time job!

Good luck!
 
I'd say you've got a project there.
If you decide to sell I'd be interested in the emergency call ambulance.
 
Some lovely and rare stuff in there.

There's a lot of stuff that's quite frankly not going to be worth the time to restore. Stuff like the token rollers and games with substantial wood damage, depending on the game. You're better off parting them out to make space to work on the games that really matter. But I also guess it depends on your goal, like others said. Restore and sell? Open an arcade? You should probably start by making an inventory of everything you can find.

As far as parts... some of this stuff is so rare you're gonna be hard pressed to find anything for it. You can try Yahoo Auctions and Mercari but your better chance is Chinese sellers like Yaton or looking around on Xianyu (Chinese used marketplace), or making friends with operators in Italy who seem to have stockpiles of random junk.

Good luck! I'm sure some of the US collectors would be very interested in getting games from you if you're open to it. :)
 
Please sponsor my visa I will come to australia and harass every goddamn chinese contact i have for your parts and work on these cabs with you

In all seriousness, +1 to everything trashedcabs said. If you need help sourcing parts I'm happy to pitch in during my spare time digging through Chinese marketplaces for you. I can either send you links for your own Chinese purchasing proxy or I can buy and ship stuff to you through my network of services.

For cable harnesses, in some cases it may make sense to recreate them from wiring diagrams rather than trying to source them. LCSC's custom cable service would help out a lot with reducing the labor load on this. You can use Wirely to design the harness itself. LCSC themselves are also a good place to grab connectors and terminals if you would prefer to DIY.
 
You could try putting a wanted ad on the Aussie Arcade Forum, but I suspect a lot of what you want isn’t available other than from other collectors or people like yourself with a warehouse stash they want to offload. Lloyds Auctions sometimes have big arcade sales. Highway has some stuff right now. https://www.highway.net.au/news/make-offer-for-arcade-machines/612.html JOMAC in Perth sometimes has chassis for sale. Infocus Electronics in Melbourne have miscellaneous chassis as well, but your collection looks like it would require lots of sought after Toshiba and Nanao chassis which are fairly scarce. What city are you in? Jakarta?
 
Last edited:
Man that's a crazy amount of cabs.
I'd brake down everything by manufacture and system like Sega system 16/18/STV/Model/Hikaru and so on. Do the same for Namco Konami Tatio and have them all separated together. Manufactures recycle parts that way you can easy find out whats worth saving and whats worth parting out. If i had 3 fucked Sega rally's and got 1 of them fully restored from parts of the other two i called that a win, give away the 2 parted out cabs for project cabs and move on to the next machine.
 
Wow, my eye is immediately drawn to those Time Crisis cabs, but what an amazing selection of games!
 
These days the best source is just making good contacts within the community. Get to know people, post up want-to-buys and build those relationships because 90% of these parts are sitting in someone's collection because most of the distributors and operators have liquidated their parts years ago.

Of course setting up saved searches on eBay and watching Yahoo Auctions like a hawk can be useful too, but it's a long game. I've had daily searches that took months if not years before I found what I needed and then you pay top dollar so it's not optimal but options are limited.

Based on your project's I'd start with just taking inventory, see what works, what has issues, what's missing, then you'll have a large list of things to start buying to get it all going.

for monitors as long as the tube is good you can likely get the Chassis fixed, in most cases you'll probably want to recap them anyway. I've heard good things about http://www.jomac.net.au/ in Australia for Monitor repair and servicing but someone from the area would probably be better to say than I.
 
@FatimahFatCakes Where in Austrailia are you.? My buddy Greg from Spacie's Arcade on YT is in Australia. Great guy and he may be able to help you sort stuff out if he's close enough. He's done many restorations on his channel.

I shot him a message on discord with this link.

Del
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top