Today is just a teaser post. I still don’t have any pictures of the new Golden Tee cabinet, but I do have three pictures of my newly acquired Centipede cabinet. I mentioned in my post yesterday that this one was in rough shape. Today, I decided to take the monitor bezel off for a good cleaning. That led to another discovery.
When I picked the Centipede cabinet up, I noticed a few mouse droppings in the bottom of the cabinet. Not uncommon and surely something that would clean up fairly easily. Today, as I was taking the monitor bezel off, mouse droppings started pouring out of the newly formed opening between the bezel and the marquee. The marquee on this cabinet was pretty beat up and I really couldn’t figure out why. I decided to take the marquee off to see what was behind it. I was greeted with this lovely picture:
You can see little bits of the nest in the upper left hand corner of the picture. I decided to remove the entire marquee and speaker tray to get a better look behind it, as this is the area that the droppings were coming from. Here’s what I discovered:
So, I spent an hour cleaning the dead mice out of the cabinet along with their accompanying nest. The marquee/speaker tray smelled so bad that I measured it and threw it in the garbage. I’ll recreate a new one that doesn’t smell like mouse piss. My first order of business with this cabinet is going to be multiple cleanings with some bleach. Hopefully that’s the last of the rodents I find in the cabinet, but this thing is beat to hell and will be my biggest restoration challenge yet. I’ll try to grab some pictures of the entire cabinet in the next few days. Sorry for the quality of these pictures but all I had with me was my cell phone. Really, did we need high quality pictures anyway?
Pretty bad mouse infestation of your Centipede. I may have you beat on the worst destruction, this pinball I picked up for free this summer must have had about 10 mice living in it for about three years, the playfield was a big doodied mess. But yuck either way, you don’t typically take a machine apart when you go and see it, but this Centipede almost forces one to make the effort to do so.