Quoted from ArcadeRaid:
Hey everyone. I'm in the club! I have a F2K that has been in my family for almost 30 years now. I think we got it around 1990. It was already a decade old by then. My parents had bought it to go in their new house game room along with Meteor. We eventually tired of Meteor but kept F2K. My parents are starting to downsize so I bought the machine off them and it is now in my home. I will be doing a bunch of work on it.
FLIPPERS
I'm putting in a flipper kit as the left flipper is weak from a botched repair someone did years ago. I'm going with a new coil as well as the crappy repair job led to the coil cracking.
SLING
I'm replacing the right lower sling coil (which works fine but is cracked.
LIGHTING
There were about 30 lights non-functional, both GI and control. Some were burned out but on many the holder is just going bad and will need to be replaced with some that aren't almost 40 years old. I'm going to experiment with some colored and white frosted LED lights for GI. It seems like the driver board is fine so I will likely go with one of the add-on boards so I can put some colored LEDs in the control lighting.
DROP TARGETS
The countdown drop targets are dirty as hell and it might be worth just putting all new clean ones in. A few don't stay up real well but I may try the trick of putting a little felt square on the lift bar to get them up higher so they catch properly. The lift bar itself looks like it snapped clean off at some point and someone reattached it with liberal and creative use of zip ties. (See photos) Not sure what to make of that. Apparently it has held up for decades like that. Seems like JB Weld might be a better solution.
BACKGLASS
The backglass is badly flaked. About 25 years ago I noticed it was happening and covered the entire back side with clear adhesive sheets. It has completely stopped any further degradation but it still looks bad. I'll be looking at a CPR backglass.
WIRING
There's some weirdness to the wiring. See photos. On the lower connector, clearly both outside wires burned out at some point. But, they appear to no longer be used as they are now empty. There is also something wired to the board with speaker wire. I'm not sure what someone did but the game is fully functional so it worked.
PLAYFIELD.
it doesn't look too bad. Some inserts are cupped. There is wear. Spots with mylar look great. I'm not really interested in trying to clear coat the whole thing for now.[quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image][quoted image]
Congrats on the F2K addition, I hope your folks gave you a break on the price LOL?
The first thing I would do is re-pin the connectors at the rectifier board TA-100. I'm not sure how much you know about pinball so I will try to explain what each part is called so don't think I'm trying to be smart, I just want to help as much as I can from my experience with F2K, also my first pin.
So the white plastic part that holds the connector pins are known as housings. For most 70's and 80's games they used Molex brand pins and housings. So J3 connector at the rect board is a 20 position molex housing with .156 in spacing. J1 is 8 position and so on. The header pins on the board itself are also .156 in spacing. The smaller headers and connectors such as the MPU and lamp driver are .100 in spacing. This is how you will identify which ones to buy.
The header pins on your rect board look crusty so I def replace those if you plan to keep that board for a while. Personally I would swap it out for a repro board from NVRAM.weebly. He makes the best replacement.
The bridge that was soldered to the front of yours (speaker wire) runs the displays and sends 185V to the SDU driver board so be careful not to touch any of the wires running from it when the game is powered up. You can leave it the way it is if the score displays are working but you should attach a heat sink to it. You can buy one that can bolt right onto it. Just use heatsink compound between the metal surfaces. https://www.sager.com/624-45abt3-424382.html?utm_source=googlemerchant&utm_medium=click&utm_campaign=sager-brand&gclid=CjwKCAjwuqfoBRAEEiwAZErCsmIrCQPrS_ramMXLLE90hVh1vyVVNWT5HNqvazoD4-TRV5wU6g6u6RoCP4kQAvD_BwE for example.
As far as missing wire, not all spaces of the connectors are always used. There will be blanks and a space known as the "key" where the will be a filler plug in a specific space in each housing to prevent the connector from being installed on the wrong pins. On your J1 rect board connector I see pin number 8 was badly burned. This is common because the GI lamps pull alot of current. That's where the white wire should be but it looks like somebody moved the white wire to pin 5 which is fine since it is tied in with the GI supply (bus)
As far as lamps not lighting up. You are right about the lamp sockets. They are old and the insulator on the bottom dry rots and causes looseness. Replacement can be found at Marco Specialties. Going with LED in the GI will definitely reduce the strain on the rect board and it's connectors.
If you want to do LED on the switched lamps, you need to buy a Alltek lamp/LED driver board. Stern games with speech have special instructions for the Alltek so you need to read the instructions thoroughly. There's a jumper harness that goes from the speech board (VU-100) to the lamp driver board, I believe to J4. 2 wires need to be cut to avoid switched illum power from back feeding to the speech board, but you find that in the Alltek manual.
As far as the drop targets falling down. It could be that they are just worn out. They have a small lip on the front that catches the metal tab of the memory coil release mech. They might be slipping off. Also sometimes the metal tabs have to be tweaked. Since this game has been HOU for so long, I think the target bank is still in good shape and shouldn't need any modifications. Also the lift bar under it is adjustable by loosening the allen screws.
Also you should probably replace the balls to save the playfield. Most home pin owners don't know that the balls should be replaced when shopped out. The balls become pitted over time from use and corrosion.
I have the CPR glass and they did a nice job on it so don't hesitate to buy one, I don't think will rerun it any time soon, since I think this is the 3rd run since 2007.