Defender Resurrection

[CheffoJeffo]

Looks great. 

[yotsuya]

I love a good, proper restoration. May Santa bring you everything you ask for!

[GearHead]

The cabinet is looking good. I picked up a repro bezel and marquee so all the exterior work is pretty much done.
When I got the cabinet it was JAMMA conversion with Final Fight in it.  No traces of Defender were left over except for the speaker and the isolation transformer.

I needed a board set, monitor, power supply and wiring harness. What's the easiest way to get all this stuff? You find another Defender on Craigslist!
Here's my $300 Defender that I found up in NH. The bottom of the cabinet has the usual water damage and delamination issues. The control panel is trash but original. Side art is worn in a lot of places. Coin door has hacked at a bit. This game has seen a lot of action. It sometimes works and monitor is flaky and pretty dim.  This will be the donor machine for the restored cabinet.  Eventually I'll clean it up and make it a Multi-Williams machine.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Let me know what you find out about the Multi Williams. I picked up a Defender myself and have been having a hard time finding a multi CP and CPO.

DeL

[GearHead]

Let me know what you find out about the Multi Williams. I picked up a Defender myself and have been having a hard time finding a multi CP and CPO.

DeL

Already on it. I wanted to keep the Defender look so rikitiki's (This Old Game)  MultiWilliams CPO and plexi are what I am probably going to pick up.
It keeps that Defender theme and avoids the cluttered look of some of the other MultiWilliams overlays. I'll cut up some new plywood for the panel.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Interested in making two?

[GearHead]

I'll let you know. If I end up getting my friend to fab it on his CNC router table the panel should be easy.

Your Defender's artwork looks like it's in great shape!

[DeLuSioNal29]

I'll let you know. If I end up getting my friend to fab it on his CNC router table the panel should be easy.

Your Defender's artwork looks like it's in great shape!

Sounds good.  No rush.  I'm not going to work on it until the Spring at the earliest.  Artwork is in great shape and luckily the water damage on the bottom is on the black part of the artwork.  I'm hoping I can cut it off and biscuit join the damaged areas, then simply mask everything off and paint those parts black.

DeL

[GearHead]

The "donor" machine will provide all the parts for the transplant. Everything needs a little work.

First up - The Monitor
The monitor was kind of working when I got the machine and then it slowly got worse.  Things got dimmer and a loud pop was heard when I tried to adjust some settings.
I installed a cap kit and a new flyback to the Wells Gardner 4900.  After hooking the chassis back up there was no image.

Luckily, I live an hour away from Sarah St. John's arcade in NH, The Pinball Wizard Arcade, one of the nicest arcades I've been to in a long time. She offered to help and threw the tube on a rejuvenator and zapped it several times.

With my JROK multi-Williams board attached to it I got a nice bright picture!  Monitors around here are hard to find so a huge shout out to Sarah.  She also runs an arcade repair business so if you have a machine that needs work look her up at MyArcadeRepair.

[GearHead]

Boardset
The game was working when I picked up the machine but after getting the monitor working I kept getting RAM errors.
I diverted a memory conversion kit from Bob Roberts I had for my Robotron over to this project and now things are finally working nicely.
Here it is running on the original board set. 




Control Panel
I moved the harness over from the donor control panel to the new control panel and plugged it in.
I then had to spend a few hours "testing" the machine.

[8BitMonk]

Great work, looks phenomenal! Going to be leaning heavily on this thread to restore mine. 

[ChadTower]

Very nice job.  Cheers!

[GearHead]

I cleaned up the inside of the cabinet a bit and ran some new grounding braid to keep it a little more true to the original cabinets. 
Sitting on my shelf was a Williams power supply repair kit so I cleaned up the PS board and installed the parts.  All the voltages are looking good and stable. Of course I realize after completing the repair that the wiring harness had been modified to use a switching power supply.  I'll have to come back to this later when I get the proper connector.



Time for transplant surgery.  The donor machine is on the left and the patient is on the right. 



The power supply, boards and harness and monitor went in without any incident. I put in a lithium battery conversion after this pic was taken.



I turned it on and although the operation was a success the patient was dead.  All I got was some white and green bars on the monitor.
Time for some emergency procedures.  I grabbed a screw driver and tapped on a few of the RAM chips.  Fired it up again and all was good.  Well, mostly. The advance switch wasn't working.  Turns out the previous owner cut the ground pin on the switching power supply cord. I tied to the ground to the rest of the wiring and Defender was up and running. 

Unfortunately I found out cabinet is a little wonky and my control panel was drilled differently than the overlay. The control panel is too wide refuses to go in. Some surgery is needed but I am going to fab a new panel so everything lines up nicely. 

Marquee and Bezel
The donor machine had a decent marquee and bezel so I moved those over to the restored cabinet too.  The marquee light was out and none of my local stores had the elusive F14T12 bulb so I decided to modernize a bit and put in a Commercial Electric 18in. LED under cabinet light from Home Depot.  It was $25 and has two brightness levels. I'll look for the fluorescent bulbs later.



Things are pretty close to being done.  Parts are on the way so I will occupy myself with rebuilding the donor cabinet for my Multi-Williams machine.

[ChadTower]

Heh, yeah, that light is pretty much a dead part now.  I put a warm white LED strip into my Defender to replace that.

[DeLuSioNal29]

Keep me posted on that Multi Williams CP you are fabricating...

[GearHead]

This project is close to being finished.

My control panel has been an adventure. I realized that the CPO I had was not drilled correctly so I picked up a new one from ArcadeShop.  Steven had a couple of blemished units left over so I snagged those. He's in the process of running another batch.   Now that my control panel looked okay I attempted to put it into place and found out my cabinet front had warped in and it was no longer the right width.  Just shave the CP down I thought.  Not so great as trying to cut or sand the CPO down would cause it to separate.  So I am not in the process of widened the cabinet front back to it's original width. I am slowly pushing the sides out and bending out the front panel.

While that's happening I will work on refinishing the second cabinet because who doesn't need concurrent projects?

DeLuSioNal29 - I am waiting for the CPO and plexi from This Old Game.

[DeLuSioNal29]

So... I released my Youtube video on Friday (with a Defender pick up) and a guy on KLOV saw it and contacted me directly.  Turns out he knows a guy who is still making these reproductions (CNC'd!).

I am in the process of contacting the guy and will let you know what he says.  He does the overlay too.  The guy who referred me told me he sells them for $90 shipped with overlay, but I will need to confirm that once I hear back.  Interested? (pic below)

DeL

[GearHead]

I haven't heard from This Old Game about when they are printing the overlays so I am definitely interested in one!  Especially if I don't have to do any cutting or drilling.

Do you know what joysticks the panels are cutout for?

[DeLuSioNal29]

From the looks of it, the panel is cut for both Japanese and Happ style sticks.  Either will fit.  I plan to put Dominux8 sticks in mine.   

I heard back from the guy and he said he is having printing issues that he's trying to sort out at the moment.  Once it's resolved he will get back to me.  So we shall see...

DeL