The www.HandheldMuseum.com Forum Forum Index
 FAQFAQ   SearchSearch   MemberlistMemberlist   UsergroupsUsergroups   RegisterRegister 
 ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Cleaning and storing the games.My notes from the field

 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    The www.HandheldMuseum.com Forum Forum Index -> Handheld Games
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
tanatron
Gakken Moon Patrol


Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Last Visit: 19 Feb 2021
Posts: 324
Location: Merate, Italy (near Milan)

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 8:36 am    Post subject: Cleaning and storing the games.My notes from the field Reply with quote

Well my friends I’ve come to a point in which ,as the Microsoft Vista TV ad, I turn back and say WOW. Shocked
It has been a hell of a rush if you consider that in October 2006 I had 0 (zero) games in my hand, and now I’ve got hundreds of them the great majority of which boxed.
So I decided to reconsider ONE by ONE my entire collection, with the goal to make a good impression when I’ll finally post the photos in the Brag section of the Forum. Laughing
Aside the mint never played games which don’t need any particular attention, I’ve focused on restoring the used ones to a decent level of presentability.
First of all the boxes. Three are the major problems with them , first the dirt and stains, second decide what to do with the various things attached on them like tape residue ,ads stickers or simply everything that wasn’t there when it was manufactured, and lastly what to do for a conservative restoration of the tears and wears of the flaps and main part of the box.
As far as me my approach has been rather drastic in trying to take everything off obviously stopping where the cardbox couldn’t hold the pressure of the traction of the tape or the sticker. As for the various tears or detached flaps or whatever my attempt is always to stop the tear from propagating and so using the clear tape ON THE INSIDE of the box and putting on the outside a tiny bit of Vinavil (water glue).For the dirt it all depends on the type of cardbox used,anyway always light scrubs with soft humid clothes .I’m now trying a more aggressive cleaner ,DECET, which is a little bit acid but doesn’t seem to have any effects on the printed box.
Second , the games. For these I’ve bought Meguiar’s Mirror Glaze # 17 and # 10 .
I’ve bought them for cleaning the clear plastic parts of the game , but being a non abrasive system I discovered that are rather good even on the coloured casing of the games themselves.
Do they take scratches off? Well ..no and yes. As they state they are effective with very very tiny hair like scratches but they can do nothing but polishing on bigger and heavier scratches.
One thing is important to keep in mind, they are solvents so you have to be careful with what’s printed on the game. they have NO effects on the white ink used on the clear plastic or generally on what is printed on the screen. They DO have effects on the black serigraphies on the main part of the game ,probably do to different inks and methods of printing .So be careful and always try on a spare game or if you don’t have one on a not visible part of the game.
As for all the stuff that’s inside the box ,paper instructions ,brochures ads ,stryrofoams inners or whatever , not much I think you could do.other than a mild cleaning.

Ok ok sorry to have bothered you!
My question is what do you do my bold heroes in particular to try to save from extinction the handheld world?


Alex


Last edited by tanatron on Fri Apr 06, 2007 12:56 pm; edited 1 time in total
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
Rik
Site Admin


Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Last Visit: 25 Mar 2024
Posts: 1932
Location: California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 11:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I try to do this with my games as they come in, so I'm not swamped with trying to clean 50 games at once. Cool

For boxes, you can actually use something like Windex on paper towels most of the time. Surprisingly, this will rarely cause any damage to the box. Wet a towel, and go over the box gently once or twice and see how much dirt comes off. If the any of the 'dirt' looks like the color of the printing on the box, stop. If it's just gray or brown, it's probably safe to continue. There's a few boxes I've found that the printing will come off, so be careful. (But most of them won't be harmed, and it you will almost always see a difference in brightness of the colors.) Also- if you don't smoke, learn to identify the smell of something from a smokers home. If you smell it, go over the entire box (and game) with the Windex/paper towel. You will see the yellowish colored smoke residue on the towel. You will probably never get the smell out of the cardboard itself, but you can reduce the smell from the outside of the box.

As for box damage, I try to never add anything like tape to the box, but the idea of using a gentle glue along a rip is an interesting one. Sometimes the rips are big enough that there's enough surface to actually glue back together... Never tried it. I will try to very carefully remove any stickers/tape applied to the box. This takes PATIENCE! You can usually remove any tape/stickers with minimal damage if you pull them slowly enough... After that, there's a product called Goo Gone which will do wonders for removing sticky residue, and has about the same track record as Windex for damaging the box...

As always, test on a spare if you have one, or in an in-conspicuous spot...

For games- if it's a used game, I will almost always take it apart and clean every little part and try to get all the dust, dirt and dead bugs out of the inside of it... Again, Windex is pretty safe on almost anything (although I have found a few games that it will remove printing from. And, it WILL remove the gold-like paint from Bandai Crazy Climber, so avoid using it on that...). If you don't want to dis-assemble your games, you can still give it a good cleaning on the outside, and get into the little corners with Q-Tips... Games like Entex Galaxian are just a pain to clean because of all the weird designs on the case... Also, be careful around anything that is a sticker. You will have mixed results cleaning over things like that (like on the Galaxian game mentioned here, the round Entex logo is a sticker that Windex will almost instantly remove all the color from...)

Another neat trick is using a white or black paint-pen to re-paint highlights on raised text (like the Off/PRO 1/PRO 2 on a Mattel Football). Paint-pens can be found at art-supply stores, and will have a ball inside them that you can hear when you shake them (thus proving it's real paint inside the pen, not ink like a Sharpie). Look here:

http://www.handheldmuseum.com/Mattel/FB.htm

The PRO 1/PRO 2 and OFF where almost completely black when I got this game, and I re-painted them with the paint-pens. The nice thing about this is that it doesn't really require any skill. You just touch the pen to the top of the raised letters and it always comes out perfect. Tomy Pac Man can benefit from this, as well as many others.

Anything that's more silk-screened on will require more skill, so I usually just leave it as-is. Rolling Eyes

You should get good results removing scuffs and such with the Meguiar’s products. If you polish enough, you should be able to get out most visible scratches. The only problem with using it all over a game is getting an even polish everywhere. Sure it's easy to do the big surfaces, but it will tend to make the plastic nice and shiny, and then you are obligated to make it nice and shiny in all the little corners that are hard to reach. Definitely something to experiment with on an extra game. Pick a game you just don't care about at all (one you would toss to someone across the room without fear that they might miss catching it... Mr. Green ), and just start polishing the heck out of it and see if you like the results you get... You will get the hang of it pretty quickly, and decide what you want to do.

Being the happy new owner of a full-sized arcade pinball machine (Dan can probably relate to this), I've started buying playfield polish/waxing products... These might do some nice things to a handheld as well... I never really thought of actually waxing a handheld game just for the purpose of making it ridiculously shiny... Might be fun to try on a few games just to see the result... (like the control panels of the Coleco arcade series... Mine always look scuffed up around the joysticks...)

As always, everyone else should feel free to share their experiences!

Rik
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
Dan
Atari Cosmos


Joined: 24 Oct 2005
Last Visit: 14 May 2023
Posts: 576
Location: Neenah, WI

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 12:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Very interesting thread!

My 2 cents: I have had wonderful results removing stickers and tape with no solvents at all, just heat it up with a hair dryer and unless the adhesive is very dried out it will make it much easier to remove. (True, it often is dried out on 25 year old games...)

And don't use anything to clean off a Tron game around the logo, that is some weak paint they use on that baby! I bet it would come off with a wet paper towel!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Rik
Site Admin


Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Last Visit: 25 Mar 2024
Posts: 1932
Location: California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 12:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ah yes, completely forgot about the hair-dryer trick... That will do wonders with still-sticky adhesive...

Another thing I do with a lot of my 'collectible' games is shrink-wrap them. Obviously this requires the additional expense of buying a shrink-wrap machine (I already had one...), but it is a great way to protect a boxed game as long as you are content to leave it sealed up... I do this with games that I buy that are still new-in-box. I'll give them a once over just to make sure, clean the box of dust/dirt, and seal them up. This will prevent shelf-wear if you move your games around a lot, and prevents the boxes from getting dirty again (and easy to dust off...)

I also wrap up some of my loose display games just to keep dust off of them once I clean them up. I sort of make 'bags' for them to help keep them clean while sitting on an open shelf for months...

Rik
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
tanatron
Gakken Moon Patrol


Joined: 03 Mar 2007
Last Visit: 19 Feb 2021
Posts: 324
Location: Merate, Italy (near Milan)

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 1:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rik,having seen the photos of your games on the shelves,and having noticed that they were all plastic covered,I was just about to ask you if they were all factory sealed or it was your way to protect them.I guess you answered!Do you think that if I'll use,don't know how it's called,the plastic shrink wrapping that you use for food in the kitchen,manually, would be good enough?Is there no danger in sealing them up with the possibility of humidity getting traped causing damage?

Alex

PS-I use to do the human hairdryer,blowing on the stickers,especially on CDs or DVDs!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
blue6demon
Adventure Vision


Joined: 31 Oct 2005
Last Visit: 01 Feb 2024
Posts: 442
Location: Montreal, QC, Canada

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 2:35 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Since i'm on a heavily checked budget Laughing i often buy games that need some restoration. One of the things i use on the casings (the white ones) is a bit of Vim (creamy cleaner with a bit of bleach in it) it works pretty good. I also use peroxyde to clean the contacts when they need it.

Windex and some Q-Tips are pretty usefull to clean those corners, i also use toothpicks a lot for the smaller places (all those baseball fields).

Pat
_________________
Keep on playing... no matter what !
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message
Rik
Site Admin


Joined: 07 Oct 2005
Last Visit: 25 Mar 2024
Posts: 1932
Location: California

PostPosted: Fri Apr 06, 2007 3:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

tanatron wrote:
Rik,having seen the photos of your games on the shelves,and having noticed that they were all plastic covered,I was just about to ask you if they were all factory sealed or it was your way to protect them.


Yeah, it's really obvious in this image:
http://img400.imageshack.us/img400/6861/rik27tk.jpg

You can see all the Mattel games I sealed up (even some of the loose ones, like the gold-plated ones)... I've never had a problem with humidity in them (there are a couple of very small holes in the shrink wrap to let air out during the shrinking process). In that picture, a few of the games came shrink wrapped (Jacks, Red Light Green Light and the Adventure Vision cartridges), so some of them were like that since the 80's and don't seem to have any problems... I wouldn't do it outside in the rain or anything, but unless it's REALLY humid, I wouldn't think there'd be a problem doing it.

Using a saran-wrap type product (the kitchen-use static plastic wrap) is probably a good alternative, and has the added benefit of being easy to remove should you want to open the game up for some reason... And if they are wrapped nicely enough, you can still display them this way and they will look fine...

Rik
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    The www.HandheldMuseum.com Forum Forum Index -> Handheld Games All times are GMT - 8 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum


Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group