I thought since I have now owned my first pin for over a month I was overdue to join the Pinside community. I recently purchased a NGG in very nice condition. There is very little playfield wear aside from a little slam ramp damage that has since been covered by a small mylar area. The cabinet is in good shape as well. The gophers are in nice condition, although Bud my need a small paint touchup at some point to fix his ball-height mustache. The upper playfield has some pretty deep scratches on the underside where Buzz’s ramp has made contact with it for quite some time, but it’s not worth replacing at this point. The machine has had a full LED kit installed. The boards look in great shape with no hacks or heat damage and the machine plays great with no errors.
To initiate myself as a true pin owner, last week I took just about everything off the top of the playfield, cleaned with Novus, waxed, and even attempted to flame polish the ramps. I figure the best way to get experience was just to dive right in. While the process was a bit slow going, it all went great and I didn’t end up with any leftover parts! I had been having some trouble with the cart switches activating far too frequently, so I stabilized the back of the upper playfield with some black foam weather stripping in the rear support slot as it had been a bit loose. I also adjusted the cart leaf switches and now don’t get any phantom cart hits (although the scores have gone down ). I replaced the wheel sticker with a new one as the existing sticker while in great shape was not aligned properly. I finished the process with a set of new rubber, new balls, and new playfield glass. While the pin didn’t look bad to begin with, it looks even better now.
The one thing that I’m still concerned with is it looks like the wheel was not mounted perfectly in the center of the cutout when it was originally assembled. It looks like I will have to move the mounting bracket to fix this. It rarely affects gameplay, but every now and then a slow roller will slightly change directions when getting caught in the wider gap between the wheel and the playfield.
What can I say except that I am now definitely hooked! What a great hobby and Pinside looks like a fabulous resource.

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Thanks for rolling out the welcome mat.

It does look nice. I may have to add it to my list of things to buy (keeps getting longer quickly)...