Tag Archives: portland

On the Street – Volkswagen Dasher and a mystery RHD roadster

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This handsome hatchback, badged as the Dasher in the US, was marketed as the first generation Passat elsewhere in the world. While production lasted from 1973 to 1981, the vile rubber bumpers on this specimen mark it as having left the assembly line sometime after the 1978 changeover to that style. It seems to have weathered the years well, notwithstanding the current owner’s questionable taste in wheels.

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This one I though was an MG T-type of some sort… But I didn’t really look at it super closely, just snapped a few pictures as I walked by.

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Now even after doing some searching I’ve got no idea what this thing is. Any ideas? Right hand drive, roadster, some kind of winged logo… I bet it’s super obvious to someone with more familiarity with this kind of car.

Eyesore

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Another of the dingy landmarks I’ve been passing by since I moved here came down in the past few weeks.

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I was walking by 218 SW Jefferson and noticed I could see light inside and the rafters were exposed.

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Circling the block told the rest of the story.

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Over a century old, it was at one point used by the Pendleton Woolen Mills company. The company still has a sizeable presence in Oregon with administrative and woolen mill facilities in the state, and even a bit of manufacturing capability.

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It’s of simple design, but I always thought it had a minimalistic appeal. I’m certain it was seismically unsafe though, which is proving to be the kiss of death for many of Portland’s more humble historic properties.

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Meanwhile across the river, the burned out hulk of the Taylor Electric Company building at 240 SE Clay seems to be getting a new lease on life. From the look of the renders of the project at least part of the original structure will be retained as a barrier around the parking lot for the new complex and possibly as part of the structure for the new building on the site. Seems to be a popular option for making use of some of the old bones of industrial buildings around the city.

Crimp, seat, repeat

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The ‘Gallag’ Galaga bootleg board I was planning on dropping into my project Midway cocktail cab shit the bed at some point during handling. I got it staged for installation, partially wired up, and then found I couldn’t get a useable video signal out of it. I could get a few frames of the attract screen when it wasn’t uncontrollably rolling, but even then everything was tinted red. I thought the G07 monitor chassis might be to blame, but swapping that out with a known good one didn’t elicit any change. Time for plan B.

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Earlier this month the Gorf control panels I bought came in the mail. They were cheap, match the original equipment for the cab, and are a two axis joystick with single button configuration which works for a ton of games. This past Friday I picked up a pair of 60 in 1 multi game boards locally for a pretty decent price. Finally, I had a generic JAMMA standard harness from a cut corner Dynamo cab I salvaged parts from several years back when the High Score arcade in the Dimond Center closed.

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I started combining all of these bits and pieces, got stuff laid out on Friday and was able to get video from the multi board. Good sign…

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I used connectors salvaged off of the super hacked up Galaxian harness that came with the Gallag bootleg board to interface the JAMMA harness cleanly with the Gorf control panels. I picked up a ton of tools and pins to use with Molex connector bodies over the past few weeks. My end goals are making everything I build from here on out very modular, and cutting out butt splice and blade connectors as much as I can.

Ended up having to special order the .084″ MLX style connectors that are common in the golden age arcade games since they’re obsolete and weren’t carried by URS electronics. I was able to get the .062″ and .096″ standard and KK stuff from them though. I’m told I’m their #2 consumer of Molex products now… That’s a little scary.

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Getting things squared away. I was testing intermittently here to make sure I had my inputs wired up correctly, and noticed the colors were distorted on one side of the monitor, but only when the cabinet was closed. At first I though it was due to the speaker coil being close to the tube, or maybe the isolation transformer… Turns out though that if you drastically change the orientation of a monitor some funky stuff can happen with magnetic fields and you’ll get odd results. Fortunately, degaussing will fix it, and in this case the built in degaussing coil on the G07 was enough to solve the issue.

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The finished product, more or less. I need to clean up the AC wiring a little bit still, there’s a lot of slack in there from the pigtails I built for the power switch and ventilation fan.

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The cab is totally playable at this point, I’ve got it booting straight to Galaga. Might try to find either a Galaga or Gorf top glass, but that’s pretty low priority since this thing is a total Frankenstein regardless of any changes. The things I 100% need to do are get a set of the plexiglass filler pieces that go behind the control panels, and wire up lighting behind them, and a set of strike brackets for the latches that hold down the table top.

Might also try to shore up the far side of the table top from the hinge since it’s bowed a bit which allows a lot of stress to be placed on the glass on that edge. Happy with the results so far though and looking forward to getting some competition going on this one since I know Galaga strikes some nostalgic chords for a lot of people.