I love and own an STTNG. It is definitely a great pinball machine. Loads of fun and extremely challenging. Challenging in all aspects. With that I mean both gameplay and repair. It's not a matter of "if" your game will have issues,it is when. The "when" part will come sooner than later. That's simply the nature of the WPC games. Common problems are the opto switches and reset problems. Both of which Inhabe been through and repaired. Last week I lost all of my controlled lamps. 18volt circuit in the power driver board had a trace go bad between The two caps on the positive side.

My advice to you would be if you are willing to learn and are extremely patient than you might be ok with this machine. Don't expect to fix things quickly If not and you want to learn from the ground up start with a beat up and barely working EM machine. That will teach you some mechanics principles and build a foundation for understanding relay logic....all of which will help you with microprocessor based repairs down the road. Learn how to read schematics. You will need this to fix STTNG. The schematics are everything in repair. The schematics detail exactly how a machine works. You can't fix something if you don't know how it works.

Best of luck and most importantly have fun!