My Taxi machine was missing its dome lights and dome light PCB. The backbox wiring was present, it just wasn't connected to anything. It looks like it is just about impossible to find a replacement dome light PCB so I decided I should create a replacement of some kind myself. Luckily the dome topper itself was present and in good shape on my game. The wiring was not hard to figure out between the manual and tracing the existing wiring. There should be 8 bulbs in the dome light: 4 #555 GI lights and 4 #906 flasher lights (2 wired to the left ramp flasher and 2 wired to the right ramp flasher). Since I decided against creating a circuit board, I got 4 #44/47 lamp sockets and 4 #89 lamp sockets which could all be surface mounted on a piece of wood that could be mounted in the existing dome light board hole. The wiring is all very simple with no diodes required since none of the lights are in the lamp matrix. I kept the lamp layout and geometry as close to the original as possible. I did end up cutting off the old 6-pin .156 IDC connector from the existing wiring and replaced it with a 6-pin .93 Molex connector (I couldn't find any 5-pin connectors locally). I plugged it in and it worked as advertised.

I've only just recently become a pinball owner in the past two months and hadn't soldered anything in over 20 years. This was a nice little project to break-in my new Hakko 888 (too bad I just missed out on the new Group Buy) and rediscover my soldering skills. I hadn't ever crimped Molex pins, but I found those went quite smoothly. This solution is far from being original equipment, but still looks and functions identically to the original version from the outside. I'm much happier now that Taxi is now hailing players in my game room with its topper lit once again.

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The Hakko is great. It only takes seconds to get up to temperature (a big difference between my old $10 iron) and stays there. I did buy a bigger chisel tip for it, although the one that was included isn't bad, just a little small. It was well worth the $80 I spent on it.

Much better (you can see it better now that it is dark out).

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Too funny, but I can't say I disagree. I guess I should have used baling wire for the GI It would have been a cleaner look if I had drilled holes for the sockets and mounted/wired them underneath, more like the playing field. At this point it was function over form.