Monday 12-27-23 New Project, Games and Having Fun

 

Awesome Day

As you may recall Larry has been working on some ideas to build a jukebox. Originally he planned to build a case for it via wood, aluminum and plexiglass, however, he also thought if he could find an old wall mounted jukeboxes maybe he could convert it. For the past month he has been watching Ebay, Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace, he had not been successful, he found a few that were either in terrible shape or far too expensive. These things are really heavy and shipping is quite spendy. Last week he found a guy in Ennis, Texas that had about 30 of them. 

This morning we drove to Ennis. For breakfast we stopped at the 317 Donut Shop. 

A couple of guys started a vehicle restoration business in a rural area just outside of Ennis, they have a huge shop filled with cars, equipment and parts mostly from the 60's, Larry loved it. One of the owners showed us the jukeboxes, he left us alone to go through them and pick what we wanted. Really nice guy. Larry picked out two.

On our way home we stopped in Hillsboro at Braum's for lunch. We shared a Pimento/Bacon Cheese burger combo. It was a very long time since we had visited a Braum's and the food was very good. 

The entire journey took over six hours and we missed a dance but we had a great time.

When we got home Larry started tearing one of the machines apart. He is basically gutting the machine and will be using the case. These machines are about 60 years old so they are not perfect but they were complete, they even came with an original key. One is chrome and the other is painted. They weigh about 35 lbs. Larry spent the rest of the day removing parts and trying to figure out what he wants to do with them. This project will take him some time and some money. He already has some parts for the conversion but he'll need more.

Some folks may remember the wall mounted jukeboxes, there were quite a few different models from multiple manufacturers. They were mainly installed in diners and restaurants back in the 50's, 60's and even into the 70's. They would be mounted in the booth where you ate. The interesting thing is these machines contained no music, they were simply large remote controls. You used the wallbox to pay and make your selections then the machine in the backroom loaded the record and sent the music back out to the wallbox or sometimes to the entire diner. How many folks do you think knew this? 

Larry said he had never thought about it and just assumed the music was stored inside the wallbox. When you think about it all the music in those days was on records, there was no physical way you could fit that many records in those small wallboxes. Of course the large console jukeboxes that were normally in places like bars and clubs had all the records inside of them, that is one of the reasons they were so large.

 

Two Jukeboxes 

 

Gutting one jukebox

Starting to take the jukebox apart

While Larry worked on the jukebox project I played games. I did the Daily Challenges of Solitaire and Mahjong before I went to bed. This afternoon I did the event, which was Event: Easy Street Mini of 5 games. It took me 6 minutes and 41 seconds, which put me in 15th place in my group. Then I moved onto playing Angry Birds.

Afterwards I played some pinball. I did the weekly challenge of Tales From The Crypt and got a new high score, which was 128,450,090. Then I played five other games, X-Men, Cirqus Voltaire, Guardians of the Galaxy, Iron Man and Johnny Mnemonic.

Tales From the Crypt

X-Men

Cirqus Voltaire

Guardians of the Galaxy

Iron Man

Johnny Mnemonic

I also worked on my jigsaw puzzle.

In the evening we watched a James Bond movie on Amazon called The World Is Not Enough. Then I watched Iron Man and a couple of episodes of The X-Files. I ended up doing 17,000 steps, which put me in 1st place in my group.