Put in a circuit breaker and unplug everything the fuse protects. Plug things in one at a time until you find everything that makes it pop and investigate from there.

Anyone who did a full restore or a plastic swap have a non broken plastic for the lower left side above the lower "T O M" targets?

Mine is broke at the bottom and then glued at another broken spot and it wont last long. My game is the definition of a "players game" with a worn playfield and im not going to buy a whole plastic set for it. Leveled the inserts and waxed her up and put leds in it but not going all in on a full restore.

If anyone has this piece id love to buy it from ya

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Found have broken 89 lamp socket. And loose wires. I can figure from the pattern the white/blue goes opposite of grey
Does the orange goto same
Lug as the grey?

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I’ve got one that isn’t too terribly thrashed. It’s yours.
I think I still have your address.

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Sweet, that'd be awesome!

Still looking for the right slingshot plastic if anyone has one in good shape

Joined the club! Now just just to read through the 72 pages and see if any one answered the question white topper or clear...

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/f14-tomcat-owners-club-fans-also-welcome/page/69#post-4544892

I will save you some reading.

Can someone please post a photo of their spinner from under the playfield. I can’t tell if the rod is incorrectly angled. It seems that it too close to the wire guide on the top side
Thanks

Mine is finally (somewhat) operational. Thanks to Clive at CoinOp Cauldron for the MPU board repair/upgrade and Brett at X-pin for the kick ass custom blue LED display. Brett also 3D printed some new brackets for me, since matching any aftermarket early F-14 display to the stock brackets is pretty much hopeless if you want it to look right.

Still much to be done here, but I've just ordered the LED kit. At the rate I'm going, it might be a 100% player's machine by 2020.
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I was wanting a blue too!!!

Is anyone currently or planning to reproduce F-14 play fields?

I believe Buthamburg is planning another run of playfields.

I finally
Got mine playing. Now to fine tune.
I am curious when the ball is shot out from the middle right lock, does is it always supposed to kick through the spinner? Mine sometimes does other times hits the post near it?
Thanks

That was an amendment done to all F-14's in order to keep the ball from wedging under the wire forms.

Mine has always gone through the spinner and loop around.

It should always kick the ball around the loop.

You might want to look at wear on the big kick arm pivot as well as wear on the coil sleeve. Might as well make sure the eject gate is moving freely while you’re at it.

Thanks
The sleeve is new. But the bracket was little loose. It now is doing 9/10
Just wanted to be sure that was how it was supposed to be

In the club! My System 11A collection is almost complete. Anyways, the wires for the beacons and fuse were cut, does anyone have good photos of how the wiring looks for them? I have a molex connector that seems to be wired wrong?

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Here's mine. The lights work, although I need to install the o-rings to make the outside two beacons work. I will be shopping this game this week.

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I looks like your connector is wired right. The unused fuse block should have the white and blue wire from the relay board ground point then to the pointed side of the molex connector running up to the lights. Here are my pictures.

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Interesting. Mine is missing the connector.

My main issue now is that it starts a new game every time you plunge a new ball if there's a ball locked in the two center locations. It also starts a new game immediately after ball 3 hits the trough. I have a switch #13 error (ball trough #3) that I have to fix. Could this be the reason or would it be something else? I want to get this game working right and then shop it. Love the theme, since I have been involved in naval aviation for the the last 25 years.

Thanks! The photos + your description is helpful. Now to figure out why my upper ramp diverter won't work. Totally stumped. Wiring is correct. Driver transistor is good. The diverter will fire when I ground the transistor. But it just won't work in test or game.

Probably a stupid assumption, but do you have all 4 balls in the machine?

Use your logic probe on U-49 pin 1 and pin 2 in coil test. Do you have pulses? Yes, the check U-50 pin 1, do you have pulses? Yes, then replace Q-76. Let me know what you find.

It’s a Rottendog board. So that would be U11 pin 14. Tests solid low. The input side (pin 6) is solid high. This is during upper diverter test.

I actually tried another System 11 board in there with the same result for the diverter. The other board has an issue with Speech not working otherwise it would be in there.

This is a normal off state for a RD board.

What happens when you briefly ground J-18 pin 8?

Where was this board from originally? It wouldn't supprize me if it's from a F-14. From what you describe, both boards are damaged in a similar manner.

Possibly not. Honestly this was a project machine and I just threw some balls in it and tried to get it to boot up and play when I bought it six months ago. Now that it's 90% working I'll worry about the details of having all the balls in it, haha! I still don't know why it would start a new game because of that though. Does it not say "Pinball Missing" like the WPC93 pins?

If it doesn't have 4 balls, it will likely start looking for the 4th ball which will screw everything up.

Uh, no.

If I ground the transistor, the diverter coil fires.

If was originally in an F-14 also. I have a Pinbot and Millionaire board I could try.

You will have to install this board and troubleshoot it too.

So the Millionaire board works fine. I’ll enjoy F-14 for a bit before resuming the troubleshooting with the Rottendog and original boards.

OK, it has all four balls and I got switch 13 working. It still starts a new game after the previous game ends. What happens is it will start the match sequence, but restart before it completes. Any locked balls are not ejected. It just sorta forgets about them until you do a reset. It does not do a reset on its own; it just starts a new game. The issue with it starting a new game any time a ball is locked and the next one is plunged seems to be gone, however.

In my 12 years of owning pins I've never seen anything like this. It almost seems like corrupt software. It has the original ROMs, so I will replace them unless someone has a better idea. The pin seems to have been stored in a very humid environment based on the amount of mildew I'm seeing and a little bit of delamination of the backbox wood. Like it sat in a garage with no temperature control for a long time. Perhaps this damaged the ROMs? The MPU board was repaired and certified good by CoinOp Cauldron, so I hope I can rule that out.

Kinda stumped on this one. I'm anxious to rip this filthy thing apart and clean it, but I want to get it working right first.

Have you put it through a thorough switch test to be sure you don't have a matrix issue? I'd also try a doing a factory restore if there are no problems in the switch matrix.

This kinda sounds like your start button is triggering somehow. This behaviour is what happens I think if you press start during game play after things are on ball 2 or later. It just starts all over, with any locked balls being left where they are. I'd also suggest running through all your switches, also try putting it in switch test and thumping the machine around a little and see if anything unexpected activates.

SOLVED!

I went through the switches and did a factory reset. Everything checked out. I also ran the CPU memory chip test, which passed. Then I realized my U27 ROM was revision 4, while my U26 ROM was revision 2. Aha! I put in a revision 4 U26 and now it works as it should. Now for cleaning, new rubber, and the full Cointaker treatment!

Guys, I need help. Built a rotisserie, and took the playfield out to clean and relamp, and rebuild the flippers, and fix up the cab.

So the issue, how in the world do I mount the back of the playfield on the rotisserie safely? Ive got clamps, but there is no clear place to mount them, and how do you remove the would back piece??

Thank you everyone, this is my first time doing this.

Hi all, I don't have an F14 but a friend of mine does and he is having a problem with it and asked me to look at it. I don't personally have much experience with system 11 machines so I figured this would be a good place to ask. Anyways the problem I found is that the game will tilt if the second ball trough switch is made and the left sling switch is activated. I will not tilt when there is only 1 ball in the trough and the sling switch is hit. Checking all switches in test mode they all seem to work perfect individually. Anyone have any ideas as what to look at?

Still looking for a nice example of an F-14 for sale. If anyone is interested in selling in the near future, PM me. Thanks.

The Rottendog board has a bad PIA (U_11D) that was causing the upper diverter to not work. Rottendog is back operational. The other board will be troubleshooting in a High Speed. Multiple special soloniods don’t fire so I’ll get out the logic probe again.

This is because you put it in a High Speed machine. If you want to run a 11a board in a 11 game you need to add a jumper on the back of the board.

'Nother couple of questions for the Pinside Brain trust.

1) I started installing the Cointaker kit today, then I realized that they send me a bunch of the 555 style for the playfield inserts. My machine doesn't have a single 555 socket. They are all 44s. Now I realize that this game changed somewhat during its production run, and I have an early version because I had the old Millionaire style display board. Does anyone know if they changed some of the lamps over to 555s at some point or did Cointaker just screw up?

2) I tried put in a few of the LED flashlamps and about half of them stay lit all the time, although they worked normally with incandescents. Taking the backbox flashlamps for example, they are on 2 different circuits - Flasher 9 and Flasher 10. The flashlamps go through a small board that appears to be a simple voltage divider (pic below) but when I try to measure across the resistors I get an open circuit for all except R2, which reads about 6 ohms. R2 is part of the circuit for Flasher 10, which is the one that is on all the time. So what do these boards do and is there a problem with R2? R1 and R4 also get very hot, and when I measure voltage across the positive lead of the lamp to GND I get 33 VDC with the lamp off. Something definitely seems amiss.

3) Flasher 9 and Flasher 10 are also wired to the playfield. Flasher 9 includes the blue and the white flashlamps toward the back, but I don't see where Flasher 10 would go. The wire was cut and twisted back together very unprofessionally, so it just goes to the pf and returns back up. Is there a playfield flashlamp somewhere that is on this circuit? I can't find any evidence of one. The manual indicates it would be near the other two for Flasher 9, so I would think it goes to the red one up there, but that is tied to the red flasher on the opposite side, which I think is Flasher 7. If someone wouldn't mind running a coil test and see if anything on the pf flashes during the coil test for Flasher 10, that would be helpful.

4) This game frigging kicks butt. I have other System 11s, including Whirlwind and ES, but this is quickly becoming my favorite. Awesome theme, music, callouts, and of course the light show. And holy hell, is it fast! One of SR's best, and I think it puts many later games to shame. Can't believe it took me this long to get one!

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They change early in production.

This is because one of the warming resistor is good and one of them is bad. If you are going to run led flasher you will need to remove the outside resistors from every resistor board or remove the black ground wires and insulate.

These were removed from the P/F so they wouldn't short out against the targets.

Yep!

Solid advice, man! I contacted Cointaker to exchange the LEDs (they were aware of the different versions) and clipped the ground wire from the backbox flasher resistor board, so now they all work with LEDs. I will do this to the others when I have time to convert them all to LED.

Now the left and right loop switches are becoming the bane of my existence. I spent the better part of two hours trying to get them adjusted right this morning. I can't seem to get them to trigger reliably when the ball goes through without having them so close that they trigger randomly. This is Williams p/n SW-1A-168 or Bally p/n A-11664, both discontinued. Action Pinball also lists Gottlieb p/n B-18807 as a possible replacement. The Gottlieb part appears to be a 2-leaf design versus the 3-leaf design of Williams. Is anyone using these and are they better?

See posts # 3410-3415 on page 69 of this thread.

Have you cleaned the contacts with a dollar bill and some alcohol? If that doesn't help, the gold layer of the contact maybe worn thru or has been removed from improper cleaning in the past. Since you can't find a replacement switch assembly you can replace just the contacts on your switch assembly with new contacts from PBR.

Contact-SM-X

CU-Contact

Switch Contacts

We offer Contacts for the blades listed above.

The CONTACT-SM-X are a silver alloy- gold flashed for EM/SS use.

The CU-CONTACT are tungstein face, copper backed for high current applications.

Contact-SM-X
CU-Contact

$0.36ea
$0.40ea

Grumpy for President!

I will order some new contacts. I've just embarked on a business trip for the next couple of weeks, so that'll be it for the annoying questions for a while.

I get balls bouncing back from launch saucer. Is it non standard stop? Or the guid wire you think

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I'm not sure if you have a early production machine or that someone just installed two posts in place of the correct part. But it should look like this.
( Pic blatantly stolen from another Pinsider).

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