Someone Parted Out This Old 1980 Stern FLIGHT 2000 Pinball Machine, Let's Part It Back In!

ladies and gentlemen this is joe's classic video games back with another cool pinball repair video for you this evening we're starting a new series on this awesome stern flight 2000 pinball machine we picked this up a couple years ago either in an auction or i'm not sure where we got it but we've had it for a couple years and it sat around for a while where we were looking for parts for it i'll show you talk about that here in a minute um but we've finally gotten to the point where we're going to work on it this thing is in pretty rough shape so if you watch this whole series you're going to see us work through all of the boards you're going to see us uh repaint a lot of the play field and then uh we should end up with a pretty decent game so if you've got a old stern or an old valley this will probably be helpful to you to fix your own so let's check it out so i'm gonna do a video here where we show what kind of shape it was in when we got it now we have repainted the legs so that we can get it up on its legs the cabinet we have not painted yet haven't done anything with it we'll probably just paint this frame we probably won't touch up the other stuff i really like this game i've had it before it's one of my favorites for sure so it has a sticker on the front that says charlotte and mecklenburg city of charlotte and mecklenburg county 84 to 85 privilege license paid on this machine and expired june of 1985. so this thing was being operated somewhere in charlotte or in the county at least in 1985 pretty cool this thing's right in the sweet spot after after speech had came out and it also has multiball and it also was designed by henry williams from williams the legendary pinball designer [Music] so the back glass is in pretty decent shape it's got a little bit of scraping right there we'll see how that lights up whenever we light it up and then there are there's some crazing which is what i call i may have that wrong but it's these little fine cracks in the paint they're really just areas where it's lifted off of the back glass see that all of that it's like spider webs on certain games it doesn't really even look that bad but on this one it probably will look bad so you have that so who knows what we'll do with that now every time we do one of these videos we get the same comment it's like this they make a new back glass well what fun is that i got the back glass i just need to fix it come on people come on peop people come on now come on people come on now come on come on now people i know they make the back come on come on people we're talking about fixing it people it's repair we're not some damn part swapper come on now i had a i had a uh operator friend a while back and he was talking trash about another operator and he was saying that the guy couldn't fix nothing he said yeah i went over this place one time he had three of the same machine sitting there you know what he was taking parts out of this one to fix this one he wasn't fixing it he was taking the parts out of this one to fix that one and then he said this i mean he's a damn part swapper don't be a part swapper people don't do that come on people come on now okay so the back glass is a little rough but the back glass being rough in comparison to the playfield being rough one of the reasons we bought this is because it's a challenge so let me show you why it's a challenge that's right the whole middle of the playfield's worn away and we're gonna fix it look at that holy crap it also has an evil knivel spinner on it we're going to fix it people don't worry about it all right so let me let me pull the glass out of it and then let's look inside it underneath the play field see how bad it looks down there see if anything's uh missing oh i got to talk about the lockdown bar there is something missing the lockdown bar now here's the problem okay this is a stern pinball machine a little bit more rare they're not rare rare but they're a little bit more rare than say a ballet pinball machine so both of these machines that's a star trek there six million dollar man there they use the same coin door the same lock down bar the same side rails right so you can find all the parts for that okay stern though they're a little bit different so if you need the lockdown bar for a stern kind of needs to come off of a stern and there's just not as many of them okay and then the coin door the coin door it kind of needs to come off a stern all right so we bought this thing and it's missing the lockdown bar but what we thought at the time at least more importantly was it's missing the lock bar receiver what the play field hangs on and what the lock bar slides down into so what in the world are we going to do about that so i looked around and i looked around and wouldn't you know it i found a gentleman selling a stern flight 2000 lockdown bar goes right back on the game now see how it's got a cut in the middle this is how they made it and i know what you're saying oh they make them new no the hell they don't they don't make these new you can't get them new so i was fortunate to find that and there's only a couple stern wide body games anyways i don't even what's the other one is there another one i think there is is uh yeah i don't even remember what the other one is there might be two or three but there's not many but i was fortunate to find that that was the tough part so then i started thinking you know what i see those for sale from time to time because people take them off machines like that's easy to take off and then put it on ebay and sell it but the actual receiver that bolts to the cabinet boy that's going to be hard to find because i need one for a wide body machine a wide body stern how in the world am i going to find that i'm going to have to find somebody that's parting out a flight 2000 and that didn't throw the cabinet away or whatever with that receiver still on there so i looked and i looked and i looked and i looked and i couldn't find one to save my life nobody had one i put up wanted to buy things nobody had one and so this went on for like a year or something and then i was you know one day i was looking at it i was like man i can't fix that game till we find that receiver and i started looking at this lockdown bar what do you notice about the lockdown bar this thing doesn't go all the way to the end right it's normal width so then i started thinking well wait a minute maybe they didn't put the wide one maybe they didn't make one for a wide body it's just the normal one because it sure looks like it's the normal size one doesn't it so i had a um i had a i found a picture of a flight 2000 where somebody was working in it and sure enough the lockdown the receiver only comes over to here or so it doesn't go all the way to the edge because there's nothing that attaches it to the side it's just bolted on the front see this how this trim piece is missing from the door that's the bolts that hold the lock down bar on the the receiver in right so then i say okay well that makes it easier because now i don't have to find one off a wide body like i had to for the lockdown bar i just need a regular one off of a stern and that's where the history of stern comes into it so way back in the olden days there was a company called chicago coin pinball chicago coin pinball went out of business it was actually i think it was the whole business that they made arcade games too chicago coin went out of business and the stern family bought chicago coin and renamed it stern in chicago illinois usa right stern electronics inc okay and they made arcade games too so like they made berserk in a couple games right so the guy that bought it uh i hope i don't mess this up i'm pretty sure his name was sam stern if that's not his name i apologize to the stern family his sons gary stern and the two of them started this company stern pinball by buying out chicago coin and using their stuff so they we actually even have one of their games it's called rampage it's an electromechanical that was a chicago coin and they made uh they turned it into the stern version or something like that i don't know but anyway they started making em games and then this was their solid state this wasn't the first one but they this is one of their solid states um so anyway sam stern was the president of williams pinball for many many years and and partial owners so gary stern's father owned williams pinball for many many years okay if you look here stern electronics inc designed by harry williams so that guy was like this legendary pinball designer that worked for williams who had done like 100 different tables i believe we'll have to look all that up but i'm pretty sure and i believe he was a little older and they talked him into designing this table and so this is like this machine is pretty sweet when it comes to sturms right so anyway stern was around for a while and then they went out of business well when they went years later whenever they uh years later data east wanted to get into the pinball business so data east opened up a pinball company and they used some of stern's um of doing things so you know what they copied would you believe they copied the lockdown bar receiver so the data east games the lock bar receiver is the exact same as the stern ones which is the exact same as the wide body like 2000 right but wait there's more data east gets bought out by sega okay oh by the way data east hired gary stern to be the president of the data east pinball side of things data east gets bought out by sega and turns it into sega pinball gary stern continues as the president of the pinball division guess what the sega pinball machines use the same exact lock bar receiver but but but wait there's more sega went out of business like a bunch of pinball companies did like late 90s uh everybody goes out of business william stops making pinball machines etc etc etc and so gary stern after sega decides to close the business buys all of the ip and starts the new stern pinball machine same guy been doing it since 1977 or 78 something like that 76 or 77 probably and when he makes the new stern pinball machines guess what he copies the freaking lock bar receiver so what i'm saying is they still make them brand new it's the same damn one after all that time i was looking for it all i had to do was just order a new one and they're like 20 bucks they're real cheap look see how the play field hangers line right up okay so we got to mount this in the cabinet look you can buy a brand new flight 2000 lock bar receiver because it's the same one they use on the data east on the stern the dad the classic stern the data east the sega and the modern stern up until a certain point at some point maybe seven eight years ago they switched the design and made it simpler but you can still get these so very very cool so i finally found the part that i needed now was that story worth my 15 minutes that i took to tell it i thought it was i thought that was a wonderful story i tried to drag it out like i drunk like it took me a year and a half to find it yeah pretty cool okay so let's take the glass off let's look underneath it and see what's underneath the playfield reunited and it feels so good reunite because it's understood there's one perfect thing and sugar this one is it we both are so excited because we're reunited hey hey what have they done to my baby what are they doing look at look at this look it's missing the paw and the plunger and the coil stop look there's parts falling out what are they doing and look on that side it's got the pawl but it's missing the coil stop oh somebody started trying to part it out or something they took the lockdown bar off and then took the lockdown bar receiver off i got there just in the nick of time so other than that though it looks pretty cool i don't see anything major missing minor stuff we can deal with you know so here is stern's regular drop targets and then here is stearns amazing alright i got it all wrong this one doesn't have it i was going to say they're memory drop targets but they don't they're not they don't have them on this one i don't oh yeah they do too yep i was right these are their memory drop targets so what does that mean it means that they have a little coil on the target where they can drop the target itself very very cool i wonder if they do that anymore i think didn't wasn't that one of the things jersey jack pinball brought back he brought back the memory targets so they call them memory targets because you knock down say you knock down this one and that one and then it resets them for player two and then it goes back to player one and it knocks those two back down how you had it or whatever pretty cool and then this is their ball walker unit um that lets it do multi-ball we'll get into that whenever we're playing it and working with it look what they've done down here what have they stolen i don't even remember what they stole look there's a connector there that plugged into something that is gone now boy that sure looks like a transformer did they steal the freaking power board out of it or a transformer or something hmm i can't remember what would plug in at the bottom look there's something missing that was screwed in there i haven't worked on one of these in like six or seven years stuff like this whenever you can't figure it out there's you know all kinds of uh resources online if you go to the internet pinball database it shows pictures of everything that kind of looks like the connector that's usually on the power supply which means my whole power supply may be missing that will suck because that's expensive we'll figure it out so this is one of the other connectors for the power supply maybe well i know it is but i don't know if it goes in the bottom or the top um and then this is the well that might be for the sound board or something looks like this goes up in the top all right i believe we may be missing a power supply assembly but hopefully it's in the back and uh i'm wrong there's lots of trash down in there i think we're going to go ahead and clean it out let me uh let me get all that stuff out and go ahead and vacuum it i can't leave it like that we got to start working on it let me i'll pull all that out so we can see what it what all is in there and then i'll vacuum it up before i put this back down vacuumed everything out looks much better already but my transformer's missing okay so this is stuff i found in it a couple coils leaves trash the reason that these are significant is because they're metal and uh it's pretty common to replace them with nylon ones old flipper coil you can tell a flipper coil because it has three lugs looks like it might be all right another flipper coil but it says aq i don't know if that's 25 475 34 4500 25 500 25 475 34 4 500. 34 4 500 yep very similar so the these are a couple flipper coils who knows if they're supposed to go on here whenever you see something like that you're in trouble though so they've got this piece of paper on it so why is that missing that's because it it's been a view it's been abrased right so if it scratched a couple of those wires together you the coil shorted so might not be any good three quarter wrappers with no quarters in them a whole bunch of little screws and stuff that must have fell out of somewhere this thing this is for something i can't remember what it's for though um a spinner bracket and then a spinner with a rooster on it i've seen this one before but i can't remember what it was on is that was that on phoenix i don't remember coin machine lubricant a non-gumming lubricant for bearings etc etc for use in all temperatures remove all vaseline or other gumming material before using valley manufacturing corporation still still located at 2640 belmont avenue chicago illinois 60618 usa look at that empty box of bulbs and then manuals and stuff these are for the displays they're little shields that go on top of the display so you don't electroshock yourself so these are little plates to put in the front door right now it says quarters dollar coin and quarters so you could change one of them out if you wanted to make it 50 cents these are some of the original instruction cards okay there's a bunch more in here too original manual and in the manual it shows you that your rectifier board is right there and your transformer assembly is right there in the bottom of the cabinet they stole 200 from me people i don't even know who did it someone at some point in time has sold 200 from me maybe even three okay so the transformer is supposed to be in the bottom it is not but that's okay we'll fix it i had a boss tell me one time about a truck we had a truck the engine blew up in it as a company truck it wasn't that old a few years old engine blew up and so i was telling him um you know he's like ultra rich good with money right and so i'm telling him uh yeah well i don't he's saying well we'll just go have the engine rebuilt and i was like man uh i hate that sucks we got to spend that much money to rebuild the engine and so he explained the concept to me that the truck with the blown engine isn't worth anything but if you rebuild the engine now the whole rest of the truck has value so you could sell it for parts but it would be better to fix the truck even if you're going to sell it right make more money on it which that was his way of looking at it so that's how i'm looking at this pinball machine yeah i could say oh well you know they've already parted it out i'm not gonna pay two three hundred dollars for that transformer um but then i can't fix the machine i won't ever be able to sell the machine as up and running and working and doing its thing so you gotta pretty much fix it unless it's just ridiculous i mean two or three hundred dollars is pretty ridiculous but unless it's just nuts right there's also a thing too where you can fix something like so we're going to spend a little bit of money getting the transformer back in it and we might not buy a new backlash for it well the next guy down the line maybe he'll spend a little money and buy a new back glass for it and you know as time goes on maybe we can cumulatively customer after customer owner after owner get it worth more money okay so that's what's in the bottom of it let's put the play field back down and then i'll take the back glass out and let's see if anything's in the back box here's our back glass you can see [Music] that it has crazing all over it you can't really it's not really cracks because the glass isn't correct if i say it's got cracks all in it people are going to think that i'm saying the glass is correct no it's like the paint has cracked lifted away from the playfield i mean from the glass and the reason that it does that is because it wasn't stored very well so over time it like so let's say you put it in a storage building and it gets cold and hot cold and hot the glass expands and the paint doesn't expand at the same speed so it's got to give somewhere and so all these little cracks pop up where the paint basically crack so the paint doesn't want to expand and the grass the glass expands a little bit and it breaks it loose has to give up eventually a lot of people think it's because of the light bulbs though the incandescents burn it i don't think that's true i've talked about that in other videos i've had some that are in perfect shape it's just because they've been around a while i mean they've been in well taken care of the uh uh sometimes certain colors are worse so like for instance the flight 2000 so it also has these little spots right but this part doesn't that's because that pink paint that they used for flight 2000 something in it just didn't hold up okay so here is the rest of it we are missing three displays we got two of them though that's a good start by this time stern had moved on to the seven digit displays so there is one six digit for the ball and play and the the uh the match in the uh credit display but the other ones should all be seven digit let's see if anything's in here all right so on the older games the transformer sits there but we've just we've figured out that it's supposed to be in the bottom and then the solenoid driver board should be here it's missing but that's not too big of a deal and then here's the mpu board with the battery still mounted that's fun so we'll see about that this is the lamp board this is uh stearns i think that's the sound board and that's the speech board or vice versa but i'm pretty sure that's the sound board and that's the speech board now if you're talking prices the transformer is probably two or three hundred bucks the solenoid driver board you can buy a new one for about a hundred bucks but i've got used one so we'll rebuild one and put an original style back in there the mpu you can buy a new one for 200 bucks but that one looks completely rebuildable to me there were there were two um eras of stern mpus there was the um mp i think it's called the mpu-100 and the mpu-200 i think and this this one was the later one which i i think it i don't know if it needed it for the speech or if it just needed it because there was more uh memory needed for the speech but it's just kind of the the newer version of the of the mpu and bali didn't bally didn't do they just did their they did a 17 and a 35 so maybe that's i don't know i'm just thinking out loud here bali had two versions too and the only difference really was that the 17 had less room for prom memory the 35 had more room for prom memory it just could use bigger chips basically there was a few other little minor things but it basically worked the same you can make a 17 into a 35 because it's just different jumpers and things like that okay so the mpu-100 you could not turn into an mpu-200 over on the stern side by the way if i didn't say already stern completely ripped off bali's boards their exact copies like this lamp driver board is the exact same as the valley board and the i don't know the the details but i believe they had some kind of agreement but they didn't ask for permission or something like that like they they did it and then told bali they'd pay him a royalty or something to that effect and i think basically what they were trying to do was if all of the like if all of the lamp boards worked like this then bali and stern with stern paying valley for the design um oh wait you know what someone updated me on this but we'll keep on with the story bally and stern if they could get the operators to know how to fix these maybe they wouldn't buy williams they would just buy valley and stern because they already knew how to work it because since two companies were using the same boards and the other williams would be the odd man out someone told me though and i have no reason not to believe this that somehow stern bought the company that designed the freaking boards that bali used and then bali had no way to stop the company from also designing the exact same board for stern to use that sounds like that's probably what happened so that's that that may be the actual story um so yeah everything looks cool here though so i'm going to vacuum this out and then perhaps i will look in my part stash and see if i have a transformer boy wouldn't that be cool save me two or three hundred bucks we can at least see if i've got one so let me vacuum this out and then i'll go see what i got okay folks i looked i don't have one extra but i do have one in a i've got an extra head for a machine that has a transformer in it so i can take it out of that but i was kind of wanting to save the whole head not as not a flight 2000 i've got a lost world that i've got just the body for and then i've got a stern stingray that i've got just the head for so i was going to repaint the head and blah blah blah but i can take the power supply out of the stern stingray head and look for another one um since the bally and the stern ones are the same you can use it for either so i don't know i guess we'll we'll do that in the meanwhile i'll look for one too maybe i can find one to order or something but that's our that's going to be our first uh thing that we need to do i am i would work on the play field first because i kind of want to get started painting it but i we need to do the power supply first so that i can get the light bulbs and stuff on on the play field um so we'll have to do that so i'll see if i can order one or if we have to pull that one out of that other one but that's what we'll be doing on the next video so leave your comments below let us know what you think so far do you think we're gonna be able to save this thing it's missing the power transformer minor parts on the flippers and the play fields destroyed also the backlash ain't that great you think we're going to be able to save it what do you think well if you've watched our channel you know we're going to save it for multiple reasons it's going to happen people and you're alone for the ride so leave your comments below let us know what you think we appreciate everybody that's been using our amazon links too if you don't know about that there's links down below to amazon if you're going to buy anything on amazon if you use our link to buy it even if it's not something that we're trying to sell you or whatever it gives us a tip so we appreciate everybody that's been doing that that's been doing really well lately by the way and also make sure to check out my brother donnie if you don't know about that my brother donny is literally my brother and he has a channel here on youtube if you like watching us work on these old pinball machines you would probably enjoy watching us work on old buildings we've bought a couple old buildings in a small town near here and we are fixing them up to help revitalize the downtown area so we'll see you over on that channel so next time we gotta cobble together a power supply and get the lights working on this thing um it would be cool to put a power supply in and the solenoid board and see if the thing even tries to boot because that battery has not leaked or if it adds it's a little bit i think it has a little bit but it's not that bad so it may still be able to uh to work as is i mean it won't but then thin chance but maybe maybe we'll get lucky be interesting to see what it does so that'll be next time we will see you on the next video and by the way i don't upload videos that i haven't um become fairly confident that we're going to be able to finish so i don't i don't like uploading like this video and then three years goes by and everybody's waiting on the next video if you're seeing this it's because i've got other videos already filmed in there on the way so i will see you soon tomorrow or the next day probably see see you then