Dun dun dun dundun. Dun dun dun dundun.

Yes, that theme music in the title means that I'm finally going to talk about the Terminator 2 rebuild. 

The installed varistor

Reviewing my old posts, I had set up the cabinet and replaced the crazy foreign plug on the line filter with a red-blooded American plug. To finish the line filter, I had to take out the 230V varistor and replace it with a more appropriate 130V one to protect the game from our pansy-ass domestic voltages. Luckily I was able to find one at Radio Shack, since protecting circuits from line surges is a pretty common application... I didn't find one at the RS that's down the street from my house because it sucks pretty bad. However, I went up the the RS in nearby Olney which not only had everything I needed but also had a graybeard working at the counter who understood my Battery Club jokes (those cell-phone shilling chumps at my local store probably weren't even born when the Battery Club was discontinued). He actually told me that the Derwood store was supposed to be closed a few years ago, but they had one good quarter which saved them. Since then they've gone back to their under-performing ways, so I won't too surprised if our local Shack is given the shaft. It'll be no big loss.

Matching serial numbers, bitches!!!

And to finish off the line filter I repinned the plug to the transformer in the tradition butterfly pattern. I had kind of a hard time pulling the old pins out... I think I used a small screwdriver to do the job. But once that was done I crimped in new pins and was done. Originally I was going to use a line filter that just needed a new plug and not all of the conversion stuff, but when I started gathering the pieces I noticed that its serial number didn't match the other parts I was going to use. So I got tough and did the full conversion. Yay for me. On the down-side the other one had a better power switch, and it had a service outlet which mine doesn't. 


Then I fed the line filter in and attached it to the cabinet. I also put in the coin interface board and selected and attached a nice coin door. 

Note the transformer with the crazy
plug on the right. Also visible: A printout
of the crappy cell phone pic I used to
 put everything back.

Moving in a semi-orderly fashion along the power train, I put in the transformer. Continuing a proud and storied tradition of crappy half-assed operator fixes, two wires had broken off the transformer plug and had been reattached with a freaky little microplug that I pulled off when I first saw it and could never reattach. So that had to be pulled out and repinned which again took a while because I didn't have the proper pin-pulling tool. Once that was done I put the transformer in the cabinet and did a quick voltage test, checking the values against what Doctor Who was putting out. Some of the voltages were disturbingly different from DW's values, but I decided to forge ahead and hope for the best.

GI plug before... burnt out.

The last step was installing the head-to-cabinet wiring. This last was a little dicey because I only had crappy cell phone pics of the cabinet before I took everything out, but I managed to get it all put together to my satisfaction. Also, the GI plug on the wiring harness had pretty much disintegrated, so I had to build a new one from scratch. My master-level crimping skills stood me in good stead, even when I realized that I had built the plug backwards. Lucky for me the GI plug is 12 pins of the same wire, so I only had to pull out the middle 5 pins and reverse them.

GI plug after... clean!

And that's pretty much most of the work I did on the cabinet. Next time I'll discuss plugging everything in.