Originally Posted by
Tanooki
I'm working so I can't reassemble the thing and test it entirely now, but the results of the cleaning itself was surprising, as was something the forum posts and videos around do not mention too.
Yesterday evening I scooped up a NES lot with a pile of games which I haven't done in 5 years now (any console) and it was a bit funky but nothing terrible. It came with this luggage bag I tossed (reaked of smoke, all of it did to a point) and also a slightly damaged Nintendo Z-Bag too. Anyway, there were a few manuals I have them folded open airing out, the Z-Bag is in the tub with a crap ton of Dawn soap and hot water but it'll go to the trash if I can't fix that stink.
Now the games were someone stinky, all dirty. I was successful in cleaning all the games up really nice inside and out (some really needed it badly on the out.) I then go to the system and did my usual deep work over pulling it apart, cleaning, removing the pins, re-aligning them, using the NES cleaning kit doused in 91% alcohol, and the shell too as the top part was funky too. Put it together and boom, damn thing won't work, had to use the hot breath trick and that even failed without a nice alignment.
Today while working I've done the boiling and the thing I noticed immediately was after the first 5min bath you use a game, I used GOLF, that's clean in-out like 20x on the pins to use the super heated metal on pins to rub the crap off. The stuff I've seen online never mentioned this but when you go to clean the water off the game (I used a q-tip) man that was nasty. The q-tip turned this gray to dark gray and a gooey mess really since the cotton obviously got wet. It was so bad I did the cart again a 2nd time (instructions online say to stop there) and it still had some gray, so I did a 3rd over and it came up relatively/nearly clean and left it at that. I was surprised to see that, figured from the rules online the heat separated the junk from the pins into the water, but no, it left it fluid/pliable on the pins and then onto the cart.
SO if you do this, clean your game, it gets years worth of gray use funk in an instant.
Shame there's no good way to do this for any other Nintendo console or handheld. I'm sure they could perhaps use it too? I'm not about to desolder a pin connector.