Scott picked up the games today.

I have an offer for this Pole Position. It is part of a bulk deal.

Dean finally got the shifter assembly to me. The game is back up and running fine.

Dean broke the shifter after breaking everyone else's high scores. He promised to replace it.

The boardsets arrived! I plugged one in and played Pole Position! This is no longer a project. It is alive. I want to touch up the solder on the gearshift and then move it upstairs for the Super Bowl party!

After much debate and sales of a few of my other games, I decided to try the Eldorado route. I sent both boardsets and a check for the repairs (2 x $125) and return shipping ($14).

Bad news! The pedal is working, but when it is connected to the "working boardset" I get no gas! I guess the boardset is not working completely.

I installed the eBay power supply and the boards came to life!

The monitor shroud is sagging and water damaged. I could not find a replacement because the monitor glass and the monitor are not parallel. Rick got handy with the xacto knife and we have a beautiful shroud.

Everything is back in the cabinet. Controls, coin box, pedal, doors, boards and power supply. Oops, power supply, that's why nothing works!

The gas pedal came out next. I removed the potentiometer and cable. Then began the long sanding process. This was in the bottom of the cabinet and received the worst of the water damage apparent in the other components. Fortunately Atari stamped these out of really thick metal.

I separated the pedal from the floorplate. I painted the floor plate and achieved a really nice finish. The pedal is black underneath and I clear coated the pedal to prevent future rust damage. I am going to get some grip tape from my skateboarding brother in law to replace the old grip tape that was nearly worn off.

I removed the control panel, then removed the steering wheel. I sanded the back of the panel and the ring around the steering wheel.

I carefully taped around the steering wheel hole, covering all the artwork and painted it black to prevent more rust.

Same deal with the wheel itself. I masked the chrome and black plastic, removed the PCB and gears then painted the remaining metal. I cleaned and repalced the gears, brushed the PCB and mounted the wheel back on the panel.

I removed the bezel and marquee. They are both is excellent condition. The metal brackets are another story. They need to be sanded and painted.

I pulled the coinbox and internal controls. These pieces are also rusted. I am going to sand and repaint them.

The coinbox came out very nice. The controls were difficult to remove. I had to discover some new tools to get them removed. Once they were off I scrubbed them with the toothbrush to remove the worst of the dirt. The plastic knob on the volume controls took a bath in dish soap and water. The remaining metal panel was sanded and painted. The overall change was a dramatic improvement.

The coin doors are in bad shape. I had to completely disassemble them and sand everything, twice. I even cleaned the plastic coin return buttons.

The bottom door is bent, probably from an attempted theft or angry driver. After everything was sanded, I tried to correct the bottom door with my mallet. It turned out pretty well. You can still see it was bent on close inspection, but overall is is pretty flat now.

I tried to achieve a similar gloss to the original paint. Not so successful here. It looks fine, but not original.

The original power supply is definitely not all there. It gives the monitor power, but nothing to the game and audio boards. I am an idiot and can't risk troubleshooting this problem. I will have to solve this with eBay!

I found a working Pole Position power supply on eBay. $30 includes shipping.

Qix has been making me crazy. The video has waves in it after a few minutes of powering up. Now I find it freezes or dies completely afte a few hours. I have tried everything in the Qix cabinet. Swapping parts with the Klax to eliminate failure points. I am stumped.

The last remaining failure point is the power supply itself. It is a newer switching power supply which should probably never fail, but I will swap it out with the power supply in the Pole Position to test it.

Qix is now working beautifully. It was the power supply all along. Great, Pole Position has only the origianl power supply. I assume it is not working and that's why the previous owner installed the newer switching power supply.

While I wait for the new boardset I begin to disassemble the game. I made a drawing of the cabinet insides and sketched the wiring harness on it so I will know how to replace it. I removed the wiring harness. The controls, coin slots and pedal are all molexed so removing the wiring is fairly easy.

Except the shifter is soldered. The game boards are soldered at the power connection mentioned earlier. One of the Audio boards has a ground wire soldered to it.

Next I removed the fan and cardboard shroud over the board cage. I am not sure this was original equipment. If it was, it was not very effective as the back door has no ventilation holes. I need to consider moving the fan or drilling a vent into the back door.

Now I pull out the board cage. It is extremely rusted. I pulled the boards out and they seem in good condition. Perhaps they will still get that trip to El Dorado and off to eBay.

I asked around on r.g.v.a.c and found a working boardset, board cage, interior controls (volume, test switch, coin counter) and wiring harness for $150! I grabbed it. It is on it's way. El Dorado was more expensive and I really want the cage and harness.

The harness in my machine was hacked up to work around a burnt edge connector. Apparently most pole positions suffer a power problem at some point in their life and this burns the power connections on the game boards. Last owner did some soldering and bypassed the edge connector wiring directly to the boards.

The harness was hacked again to modify it for the replacement power supply. The original power supply is in the cabinet, but I am assuming it doesn't work beyond the transformer.

The boards slide into an "electromagnetic field protection cage" for safe error free operation. Apparently the board cage was not designed to protect the game from water damage. It is rusted severely in spots. I hope the new cage is in much better shape.

It is obvious to me that the game boards are not right. I adjusted the video to the best possible levels and can make out the complete jumble of characters that are generated at power up. Not a good sign.

I checked it out on line. El Dorado games will fix the Pole Position boards for $150. It's kind of a cool service. You ship them your broken board and the money and they ship back a fixed board from their inventory.

The monitor has no horizontal or vertical hold. It needs a recap and should be fine. I can see from the scrambled video that the colors are all there and bright.

It is an odd PCB. Someone has placed an Electrohome G07CA0, not the normal G07CBO in this cabinet. I asked around and no one remembers the Electrohome being used in the Pole Position cabinets. This is probably a replacement monitor. I plan to test some of my spare G07CBO boards in this cabinet. If none of them work I will pick the best of the lot and recap it.

I broke down and bought a new Wells Gardner for this machine. It's expensive but beautiful to behold.

I wanted a racing game. Pole Position is the one we all remember. I found one through r.g.v.a.c in the middle of the state. I took the trip and looked it over.

I was hoping the monitor or game PCBs worked. It turns out neither worked. The cabinet is solid (A) and the artwork is good (B-). I paid $150 for the machine and carted it home. It was too much for this machine, but it was local and I was sick of paying shipping charges.

Tags: Acquisition