Hello everyone, I was wondering if the Wells Gardner K7000 monitor is any good? I am thinking of buying a Neo Geo with one in it. I don't know much about arcade machines so any advice will help. Thanks a lot
Well it works fine in my cabinet and it will be easy to repair later since they provide schematics and other service info on their site.
Yeah, they are good monitors, and generally highly reliable - which is why they ended up in so many arcade machines. The best advice I can give you is "if it isn't broken, don't fix it" - and if it is broken, try replacing the caps before you do anything else. I've seen quite a few of these things that had bad caps and which were then put totally out of alignment by people trying to adjust them.
Some of the K7xxx series flybacks are not available as spares and have not been remade, so make sure you do your homework first or you might have a tube and chassis that are effectively useless. If the tube is a Sampo tube then run away really fast.
Personally I've made the K7000 the standard for games I pick up. As stated the documentation and support for the chassis is incredible compared to some of the other monitors floating around. You'll want to watch out for the older boards that have white adjustment knobs on the flybacks. Generally those boards used cheaper capacitors and extremely cheap flybacks. Don't steer away from the board, especially if it's cheap - instead purchase a replacement flyback and a cap kit.
Very true. I'd advise against this unless you know what you're doing. Actually, that's NOT the way to go about monitor repair. It's pretty easy to diagnose a monitor fault if you do know what you're doing. Whilst capacitors do go and a cap kit does solve one or two problems, there are common issues that it won't solve. And, of course, anyone who doesn't know how to discharge a monitor safely certainly shouldn't be trying to remove the chassis. That said, most of the common monitors were fairly reliable although yes, you will find it a bit harder to get some parts for certain models. Still, a decent television engineer should be happy to work on it for you. And yes, if you're buying an MVS cab, just keep it original. The monitor is fine as long as you're not butchering the cab for other purposes. If that's your aim, I'd say leave that cab for a collector who'll appreciate it and get a generic cab or a Japanese candy-style cab.
Thanks for all the help guys. I went ahead a bought the NeoGeo (my first arcade machine) and it's a kick. I did some minor adjusting to get the monitor dialed in, and it seems to run pretty good. Again thanks for all the help.
Many of these things are 20 years old now - and at that point the caps are mostly, if not actually bad, at least marginal. I've also seen way too many monitors that have all the pots chewed up by people repeatedly trying to adjust them when the real underlying problem was that the caps were leaking and putting the DC conditions so far out on the circuit that no amount of adjustment would help. Even better is when they start playing with the static convergence magnets to try and fix the problem - and you end up with a unit where the only electronic fault is bad caps, but you have to entirely realign it because someone has frobbed with it. Sure, you can find which specific cap is leaking and change that - but then you end up doing the same thing all over again in 6 months time when another one gets so bad it becomes critical. In general, I'm not a great fan of shotgun style repair, but I will make an exception for something like an arcade monitor - they have generally been operated for long periods of time at a very high duty cycle in high temperature conditions, and that combination will eventually kill any electrolytic cap no matter how high quality it is.
I disagree. Arcade monitor repair uses the same theory as television repair. And whilst a cap job is inevitable on all monitors eventually, it doesn't necessarily mean they all need changing. Yes, you could change them all, but in some cases, you're talking about replacing expensive capacitors that didn't need replacing. Don't forget, old capacitors were generally made better than a lot that you see nowadays,too! If anyone insists on repairing an arcade monitor themselves without proper training, I would urge them to first complete some kind of basic electronics course to get a bit of background knowledge. Then go and buy Randy Fromm's DVDs.
