Darts. Well, I have a nice dart board which uses metal tipped darts and chalk for scoring. However, with kids I have never put it up. Why? Well I have fond memories of playing darts at my parents house when I was a kid. We would throw the darts from 20 feet away instead of 8 feet. They would go in the wall, and sometimes in the furniture. Then there were the "backwards" darts marathons. Yes, you would stand with your back towards the target and throw them over your head with no real sense where they were going. Usually they would end up sticking in the roof. Yes, kids and darts scare the heck out of me.

Soft tip darts are another thing. However, the cheap Wal-mart ones end up falling out of the target. The commercial ones are great, but who wants to spend that kind of money on darts? Funny how I ended up with this dart machine because of one of my kids, which is the very reason I never put up my old dart board. My daughter has a friend, who has a dad, who had of all things a broken commercial coin-op dart game. The story goes like this. He is in construction and one of his co-workers asked for some help to carry something out of his truck and throw it in the dumpster. It turns out it was this game. It belonged to the girlfriend of a co-worker who just dumped the guy. It didn't work and he wanted it out of his house. Hence, it was going to the dumpster. So my aughter's friend's dad offers to take it off the other guys hands for free upon which he then takes it home. So it then sat in his garage for many months where he attempted to fix it to no avail. Eventually he just wanted it out of his garage, so he offers it to me.

A free broken coin-op game? Sure, I'll give it a go. I was a little leary about trying to work on this equipment as I have never done that, but hey its electronic so I'll give it the old college try. It turns out there were a lot of things to fix on this old boy. It was physically unstable as it breaks apart into 3 pieces for easy transportation. Several bolts were missing and the joints were weak. I fixed that first and made it solid again. Next, it was blowing switches and fuses because the AC line to the marquee light was exposed and touching each other. After fixing that, the power supply voltage was way off. After fixing the power problems the game was playing blind with beeps and sounds, but the monitor was dead. After examining schematics to the monitor it turns out it was wired up wrong. How and when that happened, I don't know. I wired it up correctly and the monitor fired right up. I tweaked it for optimum brightness. Then I replaced several burnt out bulbs and thought I was home free. I go to play a few games and find out 4 dart board sectors were not working. Man, if I have to replace that entire board it would be expensive. I opened up the game and decide to replace a ribbon cable from the game's computer to the dart board piece. Voila! Every segment was now working, it was a bad cable. At this point I replace a few locks and we are good to go. Now mind you this. It was easy to read that paragraph on repairs but in reality it took several days of troubleshooting to get everything working proper.

So here it is. A commercial coin-op dart board game in the Basement Arcade. It's pretty fun. You can pick around 20 different games and the on-board computer does all the scoring for you. It is very nice indeed. Moral of the story. Get to know the parents of your kids friends. Let them know your hobby. They will keep a lookout for you and just might end up giving you something for free. Awesome!

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