Donkey Kong Jr. Restoration (COMPLETE)

[opt2not]

This is now complete!  See this post for the final details.





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While on vacation visiting the in-laws, I came across this Donkey Kong Junior cabinet on ebay.  The seller insisted on local pickup only, so I figured since I'm only an hour and a half's drive away, I owe it to myself to at least check it out.



It turned out that the cabinet is in great shape for it's age, physically.  There are a little bit of chipping here and there, a few scratches in the artwork, but overall it's pretty nice.  It's missing the monitor bezel, which I'll have to find somewhere...

Electronically, the monitor needs to be re-capped (from my estimate) as well as the sound seems to be fubar'd (no sounds at all from the speaker, just buzzes loud).  The buttons are good, but the joystick seems to have a very loose spring, you can tell when you depress it and feel the action when it returns to center.  I'll have to replace/repair it for sure. I borrowed my brother-in-law's truck and transported it back to his place.  It must have been pretty cool to see the truck on the freeway, loaded with a DK Jr. cabinet in the back.




Here's a ton of pictures for your perusal. Sorry 56k'rs!

Some side art scratches:




T-molding needs to be replaced:


Control Panel and parts are good:






Speaker grill:


Coin slots are a bit scratched from use:




Don't know why this hole is bigger than the screw, but the screw isn't actually screwed into anything...it's just resting in the hole..


Some of the chipping along the back and base of the cabinet:



The marquee is pristine, though the light inside isn't functional:


This is what the monitor looks like when initially turned on, I tried adjusting the horizontal and vertical holds, but this is as good as I can get it. Looks like the capacitors need a replacement?:


After about 3 minutes, this screen goes scrambled:


Here's a look at the burn-in.  It's "not bad" for it's age:


The back of the cabinet. As you can see, it's missing the lock and the backboard is affixed via two screws, grrrr ugly:




Nice, #57755 out of :


Original Schematics are in there:


Looks like a double DK board!  Yay 2 for 1!:

[Spyridon]

Great price for a game in that condition.  Looks like you have the double donkey kong board in it, so you can play DK and DK Jr.

You really don't have to do to much to it.  Add a nice bezel and you are in good shape.

[javeryh]

Wow.  That's a great price - I paid $36 for an empty cab and I thought I got a deal...

[RayB]

WTF!  $125 including the Double DK ??  Must have been an angry ex-wife selling her husband's toys. 

[opt2not]

Added some more annotations for the pictures.

Great price for a game in that condition.  Looks like you have the double donkey kong board in it, so you can play DK and DK Jr.

You really don't have to do to much to it.  Add a nice bezel and you are in good shape.

Yeah, though the chipping around the edges might bother me in the future, I'd really like to get this to a pristine condition, but for now a little work can get this to "good working condition".

Wow.  That's a great price - I paid $36 for an empty cab and I thought I got a deal...

WTF!  $125 including the Double DK ??  Must have been an angry ex-wife selling her husband's toys. 

Totally, sometimes when you look around you'll be surprised what people are getting rid of these days.

[Level42]

Congrats ! That's a steal !

[Kevin Mullins]

WTF!  $125 including the Double DK ?? 

That's what I said !!

I'd have been all over that cabinet for $125 ..... no doubt you won't find a much better deal too often for that condition AND the Braze Double DK.....

Capping the monitor and audio board should help both video and audio issues.

[mikejkelley]

Lucky!

[matt220p]

Awesome find! I hope I can find one that nice.
Matt

[DP Louie]

Wow, what a great deal!  This is the one that was in Santee, correct?  It was listed a couple of times, with no bids.  I offered the seller $100 but he said no.  If I had known it had the Braze kit I would have given him the $150 starting bid.  Oh well, it would have been a 5 hour drive for me anyway.  Thanks for the nice pics, and congrats!  I'm glad someone got it who will restore it.  The pictures he had on the eBay listing didn't do it justice... that machine is very clean, I can't believe the sideart is in such good shape!  Keep us posted on your progress...

[opt2not]

Finally ended up putting some work into this cabinet. But I didn't have a ton of time, since my vacation was primarily for visiting friends and family, so I couldn't get it to a point where I was happy.

I was able to pick up a bezel for a relatively good deal, as well as acquiring cap-kits for the video and audio boards. So for a few hours I capped the monitor, reinstalled it and tried out my luck. Unfortunately, a cap-kit didn't fix my video problems completely. The wavy image has been cleaned up, and the colours are crisp and bright. That's all good, but the problem now is that after powering up, the monitor looks great for about 5 seconds, but then the image starts to shudder/shake and it looks off-center in the horizontal position. I tried messing with the position pots a bit, but I cannot seem to get the image to stabilize. Is it perhaps a problem with the flyback? Or are additional capacitor replacements that didn't come with the stock cap-kit?
Has anyone here encountered this problem?  I have a video for it that I'll post later to give you a better idea.

I won't be able to work on it till I head down to visit the family again, but I want to have a plan of attack the next time I'm there.

[saleem]

love restoration threads and love it when more are added.keep this one rolling and post many pics and info.

thanks.

[emphatic]

An awesome find!   

[JeepMonkey]

Man, I have had a DK Jr bezel that came with my converted nintendo cabinet sitting in my basement for two years now, and I missed getting rid of it on two different projects recently.

Oh well, great find, even before the double DK board.

[opt2not]

Man, I have had a DK Jr bezel that came with my converted nintendo cabinet sitting in my basement for two years now, and I missed getting rid of it on two different projects recently.

Oh well, great find, even before the double DK board.

Awww, 2 years?  I posted a WTB thread in the BST forum a while ago. No worries though, I was able to get my decent condition bezel for pretty cheap anyways.

I'm having second thoughts about getting rid of this cabinet. Even while I was working on it, I was thinking to myself "do I really want to get rid of this beauty?".

[opt2not]

Here's the video capture of the monitor problem.


Sorry about the quality, I was in a rush when I took this.

As you can (barely) see, the game starts off perfect, then about 10 secs into it, the screen's vertical position "snaps" and cannot be adjusted. This was after I installed a new cap-kit. The wavy-ness is gone, thank goodness, and is nice and bright...but all that remains is this vert problem. Could the flyback be toast? Or perhaps there are additional caps needed to be changed...
 

[Kman-Sweden]

Make sure the monitor is grounded correctly..

[opt2not]

Now that I'm permanently down here in SoCal, I was able to reclaim my machine from my bro-in-law. 



Soon I'll tackle this resto again!  Stay tuned.

[Mike A]

Somebody is back in the game.

[opt2not]

Spent a little time debugging the monitor issue.
After re-capping the chassis and neck board, replacing the fuses, checked the cabinet's ground, in the end all it took was clearing out the h-pos and size pots that fixed my sync issue.  These pots are notorious for getting dirty, so just moving them back and forth a few times can help remove some of the build-up.

It was a small fix, but took a while to track down.  But in any case, DK Jr. is now running 100%!  (9 years later...)





I only spent a little time tuning the image, but there's a bit more convergence tweaking needed. I'll do that later.

Next up is to look at the joystick and give it a good clean and re-grease.  I'll replace the spring on it too.  Right now it doesn't reliably center back to neutral, and sometimes the switch actuation is off. I might just replace the switches in there too.

Also, this currently has some beat-up oversized t-molding installed. It's ugly, it's chipped up, and parts of it is lifting from the slot. I'm going to replace it with the proper sized molding, fresh and clean.

Slow updates as they come... 

[pbj]

Tmolding is fine.  Rub it with some novus 2 to clean and brighten it up, leave the damage as patina.

Clean up that line of rust on the monitor bezel, that just looks nasty. 

[opt2not]

Tmolding is fine.  Rub it with some novus 2 to clean and brighten it up, leave the damage as patina.

Clean up that line of rust on the monitor bezel, that just looks nasty.

Naw man, I can't live with this:



The chips in the t-molding is there because it overhangs the sides. The plastic is hard and brittle at this point, and can scratch people if they're touching the edge.

The flat/thin nintendo T-molding is cheap (like $10 for 20 feet), and available. There's no reason to not fix this.

As for the monitor bezel rust, yeah I need to do a full cleaning of this cabinet. That's on the list.

[pbj]

Okay, yeah, replace that.

[opt2not]

On a relative note, there is a t-molding trimmer available now that could help with any misalignment of the molding slot.



But for this cabinet the t-molding itself should just be replaced since it's really old and brittle.

[opt2not]

Took apart the CP today.  Looking at the joystick, it definitely needs a cleaning and re-greasing. The grease on there right now is all black and sludgy, causing the 'return to neutral' to be slow and encumbered.



I've got an order for a new spring, silicon grease, and new washers for the joystick coming, as well as new proper t-molding from mikesarcade.com. I would have ordered new replacement leaf-switches but they are on backorder, and I believe my switches are still good.

Anyone looking for Ninty cab parts should definitely check out mikesarcade (they have a lot of other replacement parts for various cabs).  I'm happy to plug them here, as they've got an incredible stock of parts, have been in the business for a while, and have great customer service.

I recently made two different orders (using up some VISA gift cards I had on-hand) and they were honest enough to combine the orders into one shipping price and refunded me the difference.
I've had other vendors just pocket that difference. 

[opt2not]

Cleaned up the joystick by removing all the old parts, cleaning out the old grease, and reapplying fresh silicon grease to the joystick. I have the same silicon grease sold by various vendors in the FGC for fightsticks.

Now the joystick springs back as it should and feels nice and loose.  Responsiveness has increased, and is a pleasure to play on now.  Nintendo joysticks can feel pretty crummy if they're not properly maintained.

Here's a video of the action:




I also got to install the new proper sized t-molding, the whole cabinet was scrubbed and cleaned, and I was able to tune up the monitor colours and convergence.

There are still a bit of small chipping on the sides, which I'm going to leave as patina. And the hole in the kick base is still there, but I'm going to install a bolt and washer there instead of dealing with filling and re-vinyling the front.

I'm calling this one done.  Here are the final shots:

[Mike A]

 

[nexusmtz]

Looks great! Nice that you're able to get back to your old projects.

[opt2not]

Looks great! Nice that you're able to get back to your old projects.

Thank you. 
It's great to have the space again to work on this stuff. It's been years since I've had an area to really work in, and during that time I could only take on small projects, mostly electrical stuff rather than construction-based.