Spring Break - Lots of work done

I took the week off because this was spring break for my kids.  Like many in this economy, we stayed home.  We're homebodies anyway and it was nice to pretend that I was a retired guy for a week.  I did a lot of things on the F-14 but waited until now to post.  Mostly because I would rather be out in the garage working on the pinball machine than in my basement office writing about it.

Here is a short list of what I did in no particular order.  I'll follow up with articles on most of these things:

- I put the rotating beacon mechanism in place.  I have no plastic covers yet.  I bought a red one off eBay and it's sitting at my desk at work.  Usually I have stuff shipped there, I didn't want to make the trip in for it though.

- I was getting switch errors on startup.  I traced those all out and got incrementally better at understanding pinball wiring.

- I rebuilt many targets.  There are 20.  I've got 10 left to do.

- I ordered some tools.  A weller soldering iron which I got to use and is really great.  TIP:  If you get the super saver shipping from Amazon and they say it will ship in 5- 10 days, chose that option anyway.  I ordered it and got it the next day.  I bought an old analog oscilloscope on eBay for $65.  I hope it works.

- I ordered spinner stickers, a new set of rubbers, a couple of chips and sockets, and a set of beacon belts from Marco.  They said it was all in stock, but when I checked a couple of days later, the chips and belts were back ordered.  Not that it would have stopped me from ordering, but I wouldn't have gotten my hopes up of getting it while on vacation.

- I ordered some coils and other things from Terry at Pinball Life and was hoping to pick it up on Monday.  I was dumb, his kids are on spring break too, he was out of town!  That was OK, I had plenty to do without the new parts.

All of this isn't counting the display problems that I fixed and wrote about already!

Without further ado, onto the details...