Removing And Installing A Monitor Chassis

The majority of problems you will encounter with arcade monitors will involve working with the monitor chassis. In order to properly work on or repair a monitor chassis, we must be able to remove it from our arcade cabinet. In this post, we will discuss how to remove and install a monitor chassis from an arcade monitor so that we can make any necessary repairs to it.

Removing And Installing A Monitor Chassis

Before you begin, we recommend unplugging or turning off the power to your arcade game. As we’ve talked about in previous posts, monitors hold an extremely high amount of voltage which can be very dangerous to you should you come in contact with it. Always be safe and take the time to make sure that your arcade game is unplugged when working with the monitor.

On that same note, the first thing we are going to do when attempting to remove a monitor chassis is to disconnect the power wires going to it. Most games use a Molex connector between the power supply and the monitor chassis which allows for a clean and easy disconnect. If your monitor chassis doesn’t have this Molex connector, you might need to cut the wires in order to remove the chassis. If you end up cutting the wires, you might consider installing a Molex connector to make it easier on you in the future. Please see our post on Installing A Molex Connector for more information.

Once we have disconnected power from the arcade monitor, we can remove the anode cup from the tube. Removing the anode cup is very similar to discharging the monitor. The main difference is that instead of just sticking the screwdriver up underneath the anode cup and waiting for a pop, we are going to use the screwdriver to push the prongs of the anode cup together so that we can remove it from the tube. For more information on this please see our post on how to Safely Discharge An Arcade Monitor.

Now that we have removed the anode cup from the tube, we can move on to unplugging the neck board. The neck board is connected to the very back end of the tube. It is usually a square circuit board and has wires connected from it to the main chassis. It might also have a ground wire attached to it from the monitor tube. If it does, make sure that you cut or unplug this wire before trying to remove it. The neck board should come off pretty easy with just a light amount of force. Sometimes you might find that someone used silicon or another adhesive to keep the neck board in place. It is best to remove this before trying to remove the neck board.

With the neck board unplugged, we can now locate and unplug the degaussing coil and yoke wires from the monitor chassis. The degaussing coil runs around the monitor tube and plugs into the monitor chassis via a two prong connector. The yoke wires come off the monitor tube and attach to the chassis via a four prong connector. The connector for the yoke wires is usually keyed with a wider space between one of the outside pins and the rest to make it easy to hook up. If your monitor chassis has two places where the yoke wires can plug in, make sure to remember which set of pins you removed it from. Locate and unplug both sets of connectors.

Next, we are going to located and detach the video wires coming from the board or PCB. These wires are responsible for making sure that your monitor gets the image the board is sending it. Sometime these wires might be split into multiple connectors. Make sure that you notice how these connectors are plugged in before attempting to remove them. Locate this connector and remove it from your chassis.

After all of these steps have been completed, you should be able to unscrew the chassis from the mounting bracket and remove it from your arcade cabinet. If your ground wire was not attached to your neck board like we talked about earlier, make sure that you detach it from the chassis before attempting removal. With your chassis removed, you can now take steps to repair it or send it off.

Installing the chassis back into your arcade cabinet is as easy as doing these steps in reverse. One item to note is that your neck board is keyed and only goes one way. Make sure that you look at both the back of the tube and the neck board so that you can line them up correctly to each other. If you have any questions or suggestions about this post, please leave them in the comments section below.