Alcohol and cotton swabs fixed almost all of the problems when I got my STTNG. It was a total basket case when I went to buy it. The previous owner did zero maintenance for a decade. The game was in constant ball search mode and was almost unplayable.

I spent a few hours getting covered in black dust cleaning all of the optos and that fixed almost every problem. Overall the pin was easy to keep working after that. Look up the known problems for this title and do those fixes and you should be good with this title.

In general I have found that as long as a pin works well when I get it the maintenance has never been that bad. The problem games are those I have purchased that had a known board problems from a battery leak, fire or power surge. Some of those pins always seem to have serious, hard to fix problems.

I ended up selling mine because I overplayed it and started to get annoyed hearing the same shout outs. I had to revert back to EM pins for a while, the chimes never seem to get old.