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If you are in the business of collecting arcade games then there is always one particularly painful process you have to go through – moving the cabinet from one location to another. Ever since I bought my first cabinets, a 1942 and a Zaxxon back in 2000, I’ve had multiple “opportunities” to try and figure out how to move the games onto a truck or van, secure them down, drive a nail-biting drive of some distance and then reverse the process at my home or arcade. Some cabinets look like they weigh much less then they actually do and of course you have to be careful so as to not damage the game as you move it. The day that someone comes up with an anti-gravity dolly, they will probably become a trillionaire over night, just because of how incredibly useful such a device would be (and not just in moving arcade cabinets around)
Here’s a story of someone who took on the mighty challenge of moving a 6-player X-Men cabinet – known for it’s bulky size, this is probably one of the worst cabinets to have to move around and up a stairs at that. As cool as dual screen cabinets are (and this has me thinking of the new Darius Burst Another Chronicle – I hope that thing has wheels) their cumbersome size is their Achilles Heel so-to-speak. You can read about the feat here at Destructoid.
Man do i remember moving this beast, it was only me ,my son, and a hillbilly with only 2 teeth and we had to get this monster on to the back of my pickup, very nasty, i bought it for $550 from a truck stop/ice cream parlor/ convinence store / arcade, up in the middle of north florida, after driving 3 hours to get there, my son kept saying , dad this looks like someplace out of deliverence, i told him we could stop and watch dueling banjos on the side of the woods once we got there. When we finally got to place, the guy had a very small arcade, i picked up a war final assualt and the x-men cab from him, i believe i paid $850 for both units, once i paid the owner, another guy showed up and he was upset that it had been sold, so he kept walking around the game like a vulture.
Well it was now time to load the truck, the vulture stood at his car about 500 ft away giving us the EYE. and the guy that sold us the game called some guy named bubba from the back, which turned out to be a 50 yr old, skinny almost completely toothless little redneck. I looked at him and said, well thse backwoods guys are probably pretty strong, boy was i wrong, now both my son and i weigh over 220lbs, and we have moved quiet a few games in our time, but when we had to lift this monster up on to the bed of my pickup truck i just about let loose my bowels, i had to run to the bathroom when it was all done, and i had a horrible stomach ache and an intense feeling of throwing up, so i run in to the place screaming bathroom!!! , bathroom!!!, they pointed me to it, and when i open the door to this cesspool of bathroom, i noticed they had no toilet paper, so i run out of the bathroom screeaming toilet paper!!!!, toilet paper!!!, my son had walked in to the place by now,and i had to send him to go get some from the owner of the place, well after 10 minutes of nausea and empting everything i had in me, i returned outside to load the other half of the cabinet which was not too bad, and then the war, which was almost as unpleasant as the heavy xmen part, once we got them all loaded up, we started back, when we arrived i had 3 other guys help us unload everything, when we got them into my facility, i went into the back to see where we could fit these, and then as im walking to the front i hear a loud explosion, like if somone broke the windshield of a car, when i get to the front, my son tried to remove the front glass and had accidentally broken it, there was glass everywhere, so after the cleanup, i contacted a glass company and had them make me a new glass front, out of tempered glass,and a new marquee glass which was also tempered, then i purchased a replacement control panel from a guy in klov, the original one was crappy, and coming apart, i found some nos artwork, replaced both monitors with new ones, found a repro marquee, and bought 3 replacement boards to have as spares, took about 5 weeks to get everything back together and working perfectly, you can see this and several other projects on a blog of sorts that i keep here,
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/170532-ccatalyst-gameroom-collection/
well thanks for letting me tell my story and congrats on your find, hopefully you will get it working and get as much fun out of it as we have.
Rick
Nice. My biggest enemy, hands-down, was moving a KeyboardMania machine. Holy crap, I hurt just thinking about that.
If you think that’s a pain in the arse, try moving an In the Groove (DDR) machine. We have to a U Haul with a ramp whenever that things goes anywhere.