My previous post, about Cocktail #1, clearly documents the “easy one.”   This second one is gonna be another story.  It has a very dead monitor, and a non-functional board.  I have not yet benched the monitor, but it has no neck glow, which is never a good sign.

The board has problems, but at least I know it is not the CPU as I already swapped it, and I know that it is not a power problem on the second Cocktail, because the board has the same behavior in Cocktail #1.

Swapped all socketed chips to no effect — they all work on the other board.  Power points seemed right on the board, but I put it into my working cabinet to verify… and while doing so I managed to cross GND with a +5v trace and smoked R30 quite nicely on my AR-II board.

I have replaced it, but am still getting voltages that are too high.  Gonna have to hunt other likley suspects…

As far as the board goes, I am gonna have to break out the Fluke 9010 to work on this one…  Right after building an adapter for it so I cam power it up on the bench.

The monitor I should know more about once I have it on the bench and take a good look at it while I am capping it (and doing the sync upgrade).

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Turns out that this one had a cracked flyback.  I ordered a replacement kit (flyback and caps) from The Real Bob Roberts and replaced the flyback (my first flyback replacement!).  Have not yet put it back into the game and fired it up, though.  Maybe after winter…

Well, I ended up taking two Centipede cocktails off of another local collector as a package deal.  Still want that Gorf, though…  Will have to come back to that one soon!

But I digress…  So I have two Centipede cocktails here.  One of them has a dead monitor (and a non-working board, I later discovered), and the other will not sync:

(Note how dirty the control panel is, as well as the color of the button and trackball to compare with another picture later in this post.)  Checked the wiring, the connectors, adjustments/controls and nothing would get it right, so I went to capping it.  Here is a picture of it half way done on my bench:

After capping it (and also doing the sync improvement upgrade while I was there), all it took was a few adjustments and the screen came up sharp and clear.  This image also shows one of the rebuilt trackballs, which is now running as smooth as when it came out of the crate:

 The text looks a bit blurry, but only in the picture.  The screen is really sharp!  You can also see a new shiny trackball at the bottom too.  Next to it is a really dirty button.  Here is one of the panels (from the other cocktail, because its panels are in better condition) with a replacement button and a (unmounted) rebuilt trackball after being cleaned up a bit:

All in all, not bad for about 3 or so hours of work, if I do say so myself.  (3 hours for everything, not just cleaning this panel! 🙂

Now, that other cocktail… that one is gonna be a bit harder…