I'd like to announce that I'm now a member of the club. I found a Marilyn edition in an estate sale with all the important parts covered in mylar. The rest of the playfield is pretty dirty and the pop bumpers are worn around them, but that's all fixable. I'm going to have this baby for a long time.

However, this is the first System 11 I've owned with solenoid/coil problems. For example, the Spinout kicker won't fire - which makes it impossible to actually play the game.

With my System 6's I was able to ground out a transistor on the driver board to have that coil go off. Is that still a thing on System 11's? I've traced all the connections to and from the coil and everything checks out, so I'd like to see if there's truly something open in the circuit or if the ICs that are supposed to be doing the pulsing of the coil are actually doing their job.

Anyone know where I can get a departure ramp decal? I'm looking for the actual decal that says "Departures" on it.

Actually, I could probably use the Sky-Taxi decal, too. I'm looking at the one I have, and it looks kind of blurry and low-res.

Alternatively, I'd be happy with a good article on making my own decals. I'm not picky.

Does anyone have a nice, clear picture of a Carry Passengers plastic? The one over Marilyn/Lola.

Like, really nice and clear. Almost as if you got the camera really close up to it. Or possibly laid the plastic down flat on an imaging device.

Whoa, whoa, WHOA. I didn't say "scan". That would be unscrupulous.

Sweet. Thanks!

Where did you hear this? I want to keep up-to-date on this news.

Oh, wait. never mind.

Not sure. I contacted PPS about the plastics and that was the reply I got.

Can anyone get me the measurements or part numbers of the pillars that hold up the arrival and departure ramps? I suspect my Taxi has a too-short ramp post under the right side of the Departure ramp, by where the switch sits. I'm putting mine back together and the hole seems to be way above the post, and the pictures I took when I took it apart shows that the wireform sits on a ton of washers in the middle. It's just not fitting together nearly as easily as I suspect it would have in the factory.

In fact, everything just seems a bit... off. If anyone could get a list of measurements for all the pillars that hold up the ramps and the Spinout, that'd be great. Part numbers would be even better. Thanks!

Two questions!

1) Does anyone know where I can get a replacement wireform ball guide for the return lanes? I'm missing one of the guides that sits between the inlane switch and the rubbers for the kicker triangle. You can see the two holes for it if you look at a bare playfield.

2) Does anyone else have inconsistent behavior for the one-way ball gate that stops balls from going back into the kicker under the Spinout? The kicker under the Spinout puts the ball into the C-A-B area, but sometimes it gets under the wire one-way gate and comes down around the Jackpot/Gorbie lane. It does this about half the time, and I feel like I've got something installed wrong. Maybe not. Maybe as long as balls don't end up back under the Spinout, then the thing is doing its job.

The ball guide into my right flipper seems to give the ball a little hop when it moves to the flipper. This completely kills the ball's momentum and makes the left ramp really hard to hit unless the ball is screaming down the inlane, or I do it from a dead capture.

Is there anything I can do to smooth the transition from the lane to the flipper?

If you've verified that the switch itself works, and that the diode works and is on the correct tabs on the switch, then the next thing to do is check all the switches in the same row and column as this switch. The column wire is the red-green one, and the row wire is the white-orange one. A break somewhere in the line on one of these two wires could be causing your malfunctioning switch. Are you sure this is the only switch in the machine that the computer doesn't recognize?

If you're certain that this is the only switch that the machine doesn't recognize, and that there are no wire breaks, the next thing to do is to break out the schematic and follow the trace from where the white-orange and green-red wires connect to the interconnect board from the playfield. Make sure you have connectivity all the way through the interconnect board into the main board.

The trace from the green-red wire should end up at SR13 before going on to U40. U40 has half of its pins connected to the switch matrix columns, and the other half of the pins go right into the PIA, which is part of the main brain circuit of the whole thing.

The trace from the white-orange wire should run through SR11 before ending up at pin 9 of U30. For both of these traces, do the best you can to make sure you have connectivity where it should be. If you find the trace coming from one of these two wires doesn't have connectivity, check the other, similar traces to see what their state is.

If everything looks OK up to here, then it's time to bust out the logic probe. Connect it to the 5v test point on your board to give it power. You may want a friend to help you trigger a switch while you put the probe against various pins on U40, U39 and U30 to see what happens when you trigger various switches. If you have connectivity all the way to the input pins of these chips, then you should see some kind of reaction on the logic probe when you trigger a switch. It might pulse, or it might just read as high. I don't know enough about this off the top of my head to say for sure.

The point is that you're looking for variant behavior when your problem switch is activated versus literally any other switch. You want to make sure the behavior on the input pins are consistent across several swtiches in the game, including your problem one. The same goes for the output pins on those chips. Those chips are talking to other chips, and if one of those chips doesn't behave properly when a switch is pressed, then that will definitely cause problems.

Give all that a shot and see what you can discover.

So, the Jackpot is designed to carry over from ball to ball, and game to game. In home use, this seems silly, since I can just opt to wait until it's at its max before collecting it. That adds an unnecessary amount of time between jackpots.

Does anyone have any suggestions about a proper base value to lock the Jackpot in at? I mean, it doesn't matter, since I'm the only one playing it, but I'd like to have the Jackpot be worth a balanced value relative to the million-point shot or the multi-ball express lane shots. Is the Jackpot difficult enough that it should be worth four million points? Two million? What say you guys?

If anyone here has experience with the sound circuitry in System 11B machines, then I'd appreciate some input on a thread I've posted.

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/taxi-missing-sound-channels

I'm missing speech, sounds, and drums from my Taxi. I have the Yamaha FM Sythesis music, though. I'm kind of giving it one last chance at finding anyone who can help before giving up and parting it out. Thanks!

Does anyone know which way the ribbon cable to the meter display should face? Is Pin 1 on the top or the bottom of the meter score display? I don't want to plug this thing back in wrong and blow it up.

It's possible I missed it, but I don't see a 1 on the small jackpot score display. I don't really see any way of which one is pin 1. Can someone just take a couple of minutes to look at theirs and tell me the right way to plug it in so I can mark the board with something for future reference?

Yep. Thanks!