Before I start I want to give credit where credit is due for this project, this was the brain child of Pinside member GRUMPY. He mentioned in a thread that he had built a few of these for his games with the 1683 beacons and was happy enough to share with me his hand drawn schematics and talk me through a bit of the process.

As many F-14 Tomcat owners know, our beloved beacons come equipped with 28V, 1683 flasher bulbs. So if you want to run 12V 89 LED's in them for further seizure inducing action it is next to impossible. That is unless you step down the voltages. This little DIY project can make those LED desires a reality. It's a pretty simple, low cost, project that takes about 1/2 an hour to put together. How simple you ask? Simple enough for me to put it together and install it successfully on my first attempt.

Parts:

Perf Board from teh Rat Shack $2.49

*5 W/ 5Ohm resistor .75 Great Plains Electronics.

2A/200V Bridge Rectifier .60 Great Plains Electronics

18G or 22G wire for jumpers ~10 inches Check yo scrap box

2 PCB Feet Steal em from a junk board

Drill Bit to drill out input/output lines

*If you are going to run incandescent 89's instead of LED's you are going to need to beef up your resistor to 10W/10 Ohms.

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Install the bridge rectifier horizontally across the perf board, then run the resistor off of the + lead on the rectifier vertically down the board (like so).

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Next we need to add some jumpers off of the bridge rectifier, and down the perf board. Our AC lines and our lines to the beacons will connect to these jumpers.

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Now that we have the resistor and our three jumpers in place, we will need to solder them to the leads of the bridge rectifier. Make sure to note the polarity and the AC leads these will be noted on your bridge rectifier.

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Fold the lead of the resistor over to create a bridge across to the lead of the rectifier. Repeat with this step with the jumpers, folding the wire over to create a bridge with its respective rectifier lead. Now hit those suckers with some solder!

Some sloppy soldering here. I will go back and clean up tomorrow before I install.

Note that I have pre-drilled holes for the input and output wires form the pinball cab.

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So you done went and built yourself a voltage regulator. Now you need to go out and find you some voltages to regulate. In your back box locate the 28V lead that runs to the beacons and their motor. We want the beacon leads AKA the white (negative) and white with blue trace (positive) located above the molex connection. I made my cut about 4 to 5 inches up from the molex.

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Take the leads that connect to the molex end AKA the AC feed and install them into the AC inputs on your perf board.

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Now repeat with the remaining lines that run to the beacons AKA the outputs. Remember the and white with blue trace is the positive lead and the straight white is your negative lead.

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Once all wires are installed we will fold them over as we did before creating a bridge to our jumpers and solder in place.

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Now it's time to get the board installed. I found that if you move the existing fuse holder over a bit you have plenty of space to mount the perf board. I am not too happy with this location and will move it once I get a new drill bit. Man that ground plating eats up bits.

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Now all that is left is to grab a pair of shades and some LED's. Grumpy recommends Comet's 50/50 13 SMD tower bulbs for the beacons. Sadly I only had one on hand and will have to make do with these 8 SMD flat tops for now.

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And remember safety first. Whenever pugging in a new piece of equipment it is always good to have a fire extinguisher handy.

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I'll try and shoot a video tonight to show the flashers in use.

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I had a red tower that I tossed in there. It looked pretty nice. It deepens the colors a bit. I will post a vid I shot last night, but it doesn't really do it justice.

Thanks for the kind words. I had been wondering how to go about doing this for a while and Grumpy was kind enough to help me out. It made sense to take some pics and document the process as I went along. It also kind of helped having some pretty good Vid's guides to use as reference.

Many thanks! This will definitely come in handy!

Very nice!

Very nice! I was just looking at how to do etching, etc this morning! I'll be curious how you make out. I am not sure if I have those skills just yet.

Thanks for the resistor link as well. I just threw this together with bits I had in my parts drawer. I would love to refine it.

Be careful what you say. I expect your inbox to be flooded in 3, 2, 1.....

Yup same thing/theory. If it is just one 28V line to the beacons like here you should just have to make one step down unit.

Yeah, even the flat top SMD's I used were brighter. That being said, $4 a bulb plus shipping hurts a little. Especially if you have something like Pin*Bot.

As far as mods go, this is pretty harmless, it's just a small disruption in the line and I had most of the parts kicking about so it made sense to attempt. It's no different really than adding in the inline fuse mod, except instead of creating circuit breaker via a fuse you are dropping down the volts via a resistor.