
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.
Connectors before replaced New pins added and the orange wire was broken before being replaced Driver board Burnt traces (Q3 replaced and solder pads lifted) Cracked solder joints Q3 installed backwards
Traces fixed and jumpers added New caps and two transistors replaced
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.
VSU-100 before capkit VSU-100 after capkit SB-300 before capkit SB-300 after capkit
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.
thank you for this article, I just got a flight 2000 for 500$ but not working…if was 5 minutes from my house.
Good to hear! F2K is a really good game. If you need any advice to get it up and running, feel free to message me.
thank you…very early in the game…only thing working when i got it was GI…and some warm wires at the power board in cabinet…it’s still in storage but will tackle it soon! It’s a little rough but it was cheap and close (5min) to me…like your pin articles a lot!
Thanks for the compliment. I would check the voltages on the rectifier board first. The connectors, bridges, and fuse holders tend to take a beating. Pinwiki is a great resource.
found issue with F2K! Ball trough not seeing 3 balls and would not coin up…
readjusted switches and…
https://youtu.be/aPJu1Wz6hxg
Awesome work! Looks like it’s coming along. You can always sell it to me when you get bored with it :).