Stern Flight 2000 Pinball Repair

Introduction

Got an email from a customer saying his Flight 2000 pinball machine stopped working. Saw some smoke on the playfield and then the game wouldn’t boot up. Looking at some of the photos he sent, I decided to take on the repair. The boards looked good, I but could tell some maintenance needed to be done.

Initial Checks

The first step I did was to make sure all the fuses were good. F4 on the rectifier board had blown. This fuse controls the +43 volts and controls the coils in the game. The next check I did was to inspect all of the coils in the game. The right top kicker coil had locked on at some point and the coil had melted. The plunger in the coil could not move and needed to be replaced. The final check I did was double check the connectors. The ones going to the rectifier board looked bad and were replaced.

Motherboards

Solenoid/Driver Board

The driver board was the first board I pulled out of the machine. At first glance, it looked good, but quickly saw some issues. There were some burnt traces on the backside of the board along with transistor, Q3, installed backwards 😲. This transistor controls the bottom pop bumper. I am curious to know when was the last time this worked. I also found Q17 was bad. This controls the right top kicker coil that was burnt from the initial inspections. I went ahead and cleaned up some of the burnt trace repairs, replaced the transistors, resistors, and diodes. I added a couple jumpers that are recommended when repairing this board. The header pins needed resoldered because there were quite a few cracked solder joints.

Lamp Driver Board

This board was in good shape and only needed one transistor replaced. I went ahead and re-flowed all header pins. Can you spot the bad transistor?

Sound Boards

I went ahead an did a capkit on both sound and speech board. Here is a list of the parts and caps (SB-300 and VSU-100). I also re-flowed the header pins and added new ribbon cables.

Score Displays

I went ahead and pulled out all of the score displays and re-flowed the header pins. This corrected most of the flickering with the displays. I also found a bad ground wire on one of the connectors and replaced it.

Playfield

There was a few switches that needed adjusted along with a couple ceramic capacitors that needed replaced. Not much looked out of place on the playfield. I did notice that the lower pop bumper had been modded to avoid the transistor (the one installed backwards). A relay was added and provided power to the pop bumper. Since this was working fine, I left it alone.

Conclusion

This repair just needed some board work along with some adjustment and a new kick-out coil. Many of the original caps were still on the board and updating those will hopefully make the game more reliable.

I enjoyed playing this game and really liked the challenge of getting multiball. Another cool feature of this game is the spinner points and bonus points are cumulative and can rack up big scores with these maxed out.