I picked up a mostly working F-14 Tomcat this week. This game has been on my personal wishlist for some time and I am very happy to have it! There are several things that need addressed and I will try to post them as I go along. I know that there are plenty of post on restoration and I am by far not the best restoration guy there is but l, this one and this post are mine. I am looking for possible advise and help along the way. Please feel free to chime in if you see something or I am going to do something terribly wrong.

After playing the game a time or two and going thru it, it mainly seems to work short of some lights and the right sling. It’s filthy dirty and the playfield Mylar is lifting on the inserts and other spots on the playfield. It has planking in spots and a few small wear holes. For the most part it’s not too bad for a player. Cabinet is solid.

So here is my plan. I am going to clean this game up and rebuild it as a nice player. I am going to remover the Mylar, re-decal the inserts and put a playfield protector on the game. Yes I do understand all the ins and outs of the protector but remember game is a player. I don’t want to spend 6 months messing with a auto clear on this game. If I decide in the future I want to further restore the game I should be able to just remove the protector and restore the playfield or my plan... just buy a repro when they are re released and use it. Besides that from a financial stand point. I doubt I would ever get money and time from a swap... Not my point here either. Just saying before I get all the cc guys saying oh no on the protector. For my purpose I think it will be perfect. so here are some pictures of what we are starting with.

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The game has a Rottendog in it. It also has a power supply that has original caps on it. I don’t see fuses for the bridges. I am going to remove the power supply and replace the caps and connectors. I will probably go ahead and convert the high voltage to 91v. My display is week at the player one position. I know it won’t change that. I think blue or red digits would look good in this game. I’ll probably just sell the original display and replace this. But in the mean time the HV on this board would be good just pop in fuse if I needed to swap it around and use the high voltage.

I will also add fuses for the bridge rectifiers.

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So I pulled the Mylar up off the playfield. It honestly came up easier than I thought. I really only pulled up paint around the inserts and I think the decals I am going to order will cover that nicely. I wish I would have taken better pictures here.

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The original clear was spidered and yellow. It gives the inserts a look like they are cracked. But if you clean the glues and clear off they don’t look bad. They are still pretty flat too.

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Thank you and good luck with your F-14. I hope this turns out like I am envisioning.... Hopefully it helps others make a decision if it’s for them or not.

Here are a few more pics of me removing the decals. I’m still getting glue up too. I know people have all kinds of methods for getting the glue up. If I was going to totally tear down the playfield I would use flower. It works really well but it is messy. Because I don’t plan to totally tear down the bottom of the playfield ( just flippers, slings, pop, lamps) I have just been using my finger nail with alcohol with some paper towels. I dab a small alcohol on where the glue is, lightly rub around with my fingers. Where it is really stuck I lightly scratch it with my nail. Then I wipe it up with the papery towel. I have a bright light over the playfield so I can see the glue residue. I just wet a paper towel with alcohol and wipe it up.

I have been using a small pic that I use for board work to carefully remove the old clear and decals from the inserts.

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Honestly, I really don’t have any. This playfield is in pretty good shape in that respect.

Slight change of plans!

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The tear down begins

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You will need to take it out.

I have got the alignment down. Just need to CC wood and let cure for a few days now.

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After installing the hardtop and starting to repopulate the playfield. There are a few small errors in the registration that I wish I would have fixed prior to installation. I noticed them when I have turned the playfield in multiple directions. None are noticeable from player prospective.

Out of #44 LEDs so trying to order from comet.

Decided to paint flipper bases after sandblasting. Little under playfield bling with 4 new flippers getting assembled today

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Flipper porn

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You can’t see them unless you look down the playfield from the other end.

Thank you! It’s a lot of work to put this on. I’m glad it really does look pretty nice. I can’t wait to get it completely together.

Almost...

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Yeah. That was my thought too. If you are willing to invest the work to do it this is pretty awesome. This game needed tore down and shopped out so.... that made my decision pretty easy.

I read a lot about the playfield protector. Short term it’s going to be way less work. Long term My guess is it will be more time to clean the game and have to take it out to clean stuff that will get under it.

Getting close. I needed a PIA for something so I used one out of this game.... I put one I thought was good back in and have a few issues that were not there before..... guess that chip may not be good? I have a tube of new ones on the way. Hope they get here soon. May have to dig thru the parts boards....

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It isn’t playing correctly yet but I can say this for the couple balls I have played.... it’s very fast. Blink and the ball is gone. The ripoff is stupid!!!

I can see that it’s not as valuable as a restored game with a new or restored playfield that was cc. But if this is the best option you have and don’t want to wait for another round of playfields or yours is not a restoration candidate...

It plays very fast. I’m still working thru issues So I can’t play thru a full game yet. Hardtop related issues are: Switches do not all register when the ball rolls over due to the height difference. The two center ball kick outs are now much further down in the surface. The factory milled that out so the kick out was flat. Now there is a bump there the height of the hard top. When the ball kicks out it flys up and gets stuck in the ramps now. I’m going to have to take that apart and put some kind of plastic space in the thickness of the hardtop to re even the surface.

Before tear down of one special solenoid not working. Now seems I have two. One that wants to lock on tho. Need to check switch adjustments and then look at wiring. One dose not register in edges... Player one on the display was being flakey and now it’s worse. Player two three and four looked good and I wiggled the connectors around and now player two is doing same thing. Need to look at that too. I am also having a sound issue I didn’t before. Game is missing like 4 of the sounds all the sudden. Fml. Such is my life