This weekend’s project: rebuilding the controllers for a 1980 tabletop Missile Command game.

Since there seems to be some interest, here’s how you refurbish a 40-year-old arcade trackball, and why you’d bother.

As noted, this particular game was built in 1980, at Atari’s Ireland factory. Since then it’s been played a lot (for about 20 years) and then sat around for most of the next 20. I bought it in 2003, when everything more or less still worked.

But shortly after that I got engaged and subsequently married, and as there wasn’t enough room in that house for multiple arcade games and one wife, Missile Command went out to a detached garage, where it stayed for about 10 years, rarely played.

Shortly before we moved in 2013, I plugged it in and fired it up, only to get a loud electronic BLAAAAAT! And then silence. For Missile Command, it appeared to be…

But we had enough room in the new place, so along it came, and I’ve been slowly getting stuff fixed ever since. I've decided to see if I can get it back to 100% working during the Great Quarantine. The controls were very rough by this time, the trackballs didn’t roll smoothly.

Once I pulled them from the cabinet it was easy to see why. The bearings were, of course, 40 years old and their lubrication had broken down, and before that the roller rods were quite worn, as you can see here with the Player 1 controller disassembled:

A couple of refurbishment kits from http://ArcadeShop.com  in Moultrie, GA later, the mechanism looks like this, and everything turns smoothly again.

I haven’t completely reassembled them yet because I need to add a few drops of 3-in-1 Oil (which is literally what Atari on 1980 recommended on a sticker), but I’m out. I’ll need to find a Social Distancing-Friendly way to grab a can before finishing. But really, this was easy.

Up next will be replacing all the capacitors on the monitor circuit boards. That’s not going to be such a piece of cake, so think good thoughts...