Thanks for the link Neil. I'm gonna order that stuff and give it a try. I think the guy is trying to make everything right. It just bums me out cause I was SO EXCITED to be playing DK this week! Arrgh!
Here are some photos of the disaster that was inside the cabinet as I opened it for the first time:
http://zerocommit.com/dk/murder/
Neil is your paint a little textured? Or is it real smooth?
@Neil
Like many others I have been lurking about watching this as it progressed. Congrats Neil - it turned out very nice - in fact it inspired me to resto my Radarscope DK.
@blkdog7 - First off my condolences. You have my sympathy. I would have immediately picked up the phone and put a stop payment on the check or credit card. (If paid by credit card get on the phone now!!!) And my second call would be to shipping company. Dear god I'm pissed and it's not even my machine. You paid for a machine that was parted and pieced together with hand made brackets, the paint job is ridiculous (one photo actually shows striping) and looking at the rest of it makes me sick. Here's some tough love brother - you got hosed, no, you got raped. This is a flat out rape job. Even if he offered to send you a new monitor (which it'll probably be used and have burn in) it doesn't pay for the time and aggravation and the other poor quality work on that cabinet. The side art comming off? Pfffhhhh STOP PAYMENT - it's too much hassle for that seller to have it shipped back - he'll more than likely cut it as a loss. Money back and a free cabinet. I have restored EVERY little thing on my DK cab and I tell you this is god aweful. You as the buyer did your job - you found the item you wanted - you ordered it and it arrived not only destroyed but what a gross misrepresentation of the product from pic to real life. You work hard for your money and if this is the quality of work this person does - they need to be put of out of business.
I had two paths to take. I could be a dick and stop payment on my AMEX or I could be cool and try to get this all to work out. I chose to be cool and patient and I don't regret it that much. At the end of the day I got a nice looking machine and I KNOW AN AMAZING AMOUNT ABOUT HOW IT WORKS!! You have no idea the amount of time I have spent researching, tweaking, etc.
Anyways, I got the new monitor and it looks like it was made yesterday. It is so clean and immaculate and there is ZERO, NONE, NO burn it at all! Woot! There are some scratches on the glass near the bottom but they aren't really noticeable when it is behind the smoked DK bezel. You really gotta be looking for them to see them. So... I plugged it in and nothing happened. After some trouble shooting I found a disconnected power wire on the bottom by that transformer block. I plugged it and it fired up!! Woot!
The game is working but I have some issues now with sound and a missing green color. I have no green. Rats! I have (I think) figured out that it is not the monitor. I can get green to show up on the monitor if I disconnect the video cable and fiddle with the flyback and Green Bias pot. I can see green on the monitor when the cable is disconnected. So, the green gun is firing. The seller has agreed to send me a PCB from Mike's Arcade (I requested this.) So, I am now waiting for a new PCB to fix the missing sound issues and hopefully the missing green issue. For the time being I have a working machine that is totally playable but it has some issues. So, once the PCB shows up I hope I am good to go and all of this is behind me.
The seller also agreed to send me the missing PCB brackets, back support brace that is missing, and a new cardboard monitor bezel.
In the meantime I have been replacing some parts that bugged me. You can view my machine in its current state here:
http://zerocommit.com/dk/I have managed to get most of the bubbles out of the artwork but they keep coming back!! I can get them out completely and then the next day they are back. Arrgh!! What's the trick to removing them permanently?