Congrats! F2K is awesome.

--Luke

Panthera is a fun and challenging pin, I have only seen / played one. they must be very uncommon ?

F2K is the slowest playing stern pin ever made, way to much stop and start, not enough flow, but Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if you are stoked, that that's all that maters .
Enjoy your pins, have fun

Brian Lenker
Madison hts, Mi
586-344-0721

No power from F2K at all?
Rich

Yeah Panthera is cool .

Except the sounds are terrible.

I love the sounds , they make me laugh when I hear some of them . If I'm laughing it means I'm having fun, The sounds definently make the game more enjoyable to me at least .

LOL, some of them sound like someone farting in the woods, some sound like the Tikki room at Disneyland. Don't get me wrong, I have the game too and like it. I just wish they did a better job on the sound calls.

Ha ! yep but they kind of match the theme . It's not like playing Jungle Lord and hearing space sounds.

Yeah, the power board down in the bottom was pulled out, and it apparently doesn't turn on. I haven't had the time to investigate yet.

Now, I'm looking forward to the sounds of Panthera! It should be quite fun!

Power board pulled out? Yikes, that board was soldered in. Luckily there's replacement rectifier boards available. The original rectifiers were originally undersized and usually overheated and burned out by now. I have seen many of these get rebuilt with larger rectifiers. Marco has a nice replacement that has status LED's showing that the output voltages are within range. Pin-logic used to have a board with a connector kit that eliminates the need to solder but I don't know if he still has them. It's also a good idea got change the 44 lamps to 47's to take stress off the board and re-pin the connectors to Trifurcon connectors.

DSC01922.JPG DSC01923.JPG

The previous pics are of the Marco board. What's nice about it, is that the rectifiers are larger but still small enough that you can still keep the plastic guard on it. The only modification needed is to place the heatsink behind the mounting plate as opposed to placing it in between the rectifier board and mounting plate.

Flight 2000 is slow? Are you serious? Its got 4 slingshots and with a clean and waxed playfield its just about as fast as any game out there. No flow?...its got straight forward objectives with a definite flow. By the way, is speed the main factor in a pinball machine or is it fun gameplay?

+1 to this.

--Luke

When you are over this weekend you can go through my Magic for pics and notes (uses the same transformer and rectifier board)

here ya go! http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/AS-2518-18-1

I used the Great Plains Electronics rectifier board in my F2K and am very happy with the results:

http://www.greatplainselectronics.com/proddetail.asp?prod=135-105

It comes with all the trifurcon pins and connector housings that you need to redo the connectors, too.

--Luke

+1 on Ed's boards and service.

I forgot about Ed's, I think I got him mixed up with Pin-logic on my earlier post, yes his service is top notch.

I might add... I don't know the condition of your backglass, but the F2K that I picked up last year had one that was awful. After waiting for what seemed like forever for CPR to do their final run of repo backglasses for Flight 2000, I stopped checking. I randomly checked a short while ago, and low and behold... they were produced and sold out. I did see that Marco still has some and promptly ordered one (with only $7 shipping vs. the $40 CPR charges). If you need one, I'd not wait.
Welcome to the club.... hope you get it running soon!

$7 shipping? They made a mistake in your favor! I paid more than that for a small parts order.

I know. Crazy for such a large box- from FedEx too.

I don't have any RD boards but I never hear anything bad about them. Make sure you get a diagram of where to solder the wire on the Stern board. There should be a number at each solder point.

How did you know the slings needed work before you got game running? The sling mechs on these games wear and the kicker will get sloppy. There's no replacements for these unless you find NOS or a game with low plays. On F2K I found that the upper left sling gets the least amount of hits and is usually less worn. I found that placing a nylon washer on the pivot shaft helps reduce the slop.

The solder points for the rectifier board can be found on pinwiki.
Rich

Ordered a new Earthshaker backglass from macro a couple days ago and same thing, $7 shipping. Was $10 over CPR's price but they wanted $40 to ship so was a no brainer.

RD boards seem decent. I only have one, in my Gilligan's Island -- it's only a few months old but seems to work great!

Good luck with your machines!

Derek

Oops, I meant the upper Right sling, not left. Are the sling switches okay? Or did somebody rob parts from it?

There are wire color - location maps on the internet and the F2K manual. They are the leads from the Transformer that connect to the back of the board. I would pull the whole assembly out of the bottom of the game and clean it up. You could get matching gauged wire/color and solder the appropriate colors together and then heat shrink.

There may be enough of the original still there to just use it, its hard to tell from your picture.

yeah that's a wicked hack. Looks like some replaced the board before by splicing and crimping. You would have to do what Xenon75 said and replace the wiring back to the transformer to make it right. I thought you said the rectifier board was removed? Did you plug in J1 and see if he powers up?

Best of luck with your repairs and congrats on your new games.

http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=File:Stern-ta100-16b-6.png

That's a plug in "ice cube" style relay.

Thanks!
Can anyone identify this?

Looks like a flipper relay, is it on the F2K? It's weird that someone would pull out the entire transformer assy. unless to make it easier to work on it as pulling it out saves you from leaning over the cab. I think whoever did this never finished the job and left you a mess. Having and extra space on the connector housing is no biggie, you can trim it or let it hang over as long as it's keyed correctly. It can also be because This board is used in bally games and J1 has 9 pins instead of 8. Heres a few pics from one of my F2K's. J1 is important to be correct because it supplies the GI and Switches lamp bus and the flipper coil power. Notice there is 2 blue wires to run the switched lamps. Pin 4(counting from the left) is the key. The red wire on pin 1, start from there and you should be fine.

DSC02061.JPG DSC02060.JPG DSC02058.JPG