depends which Table You have,Here come the Table police.

Brand new Stern game just out of the box?

Play it.

Eventually, clean the playfield and change the balls.

Looks like You have a JP,great game.if everythings working good just change coil sleeves and stops when the flippers start acting up and change rubber when it looks tired .Keep the playfield and rubber clean and Your good until something breaks.

Congrats on your new game!

Lots of info available via the search tool and YouTube. Pinsider Vid1900 has done a lot of information threads:

https://pinside.com/pinball/community/pinsiders/vid1900/forum/topics

Also - FWIW (since you're apparently new to the hobby) - most pinball hobby veterans (aka "pinheads") refer to pinball machines as games - not tables. A term typically used by non-hobbyists who also often refer to us as "pinball wizards" as well. Ugh!

will this work on pinball ?

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The entire package is usually called a pinball game or a pinball machine.

The folks whose eyes twitch when someone says Pinball Table just need to give it a rest.

The first line from Wikipedia about pinballs :

"Pinball games are a family of games in which a ball is propelled into a specially designed table..."

Also if you get into Visual or Virtual Pinball, all the games are put in a folder called "Tables" and not "Games" or "Machines" ...

So yeah, welcome to the hobby, call it whatever you want! I prefer calling them the lengthy "Interactive American Engineered Physics Based Sculptures Which You Can Also Use As A Table When You Need To Set Your Amazon Packages Somewhere"

Congrats on the Jp I also have 1 see You in the Jurassic Park threads.You will have 2 soon I can almost guarantee.

pinwiki.com is a good resource for repair information, though it's mostly geared towards older games, rather than games that recently came off the factory line.

Keep the game clean, wax it every so often (depending on how often it gets played), replace rubbers when they start getting damaged (including the tip of the shooter rod), and replace the balls when they start getting scratched up (balls in poor condition can start acting like sandpaper)

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cleaning-and-waxing-pinball-machines-vids-guide

Optional: add cliffy protectors and mylar to help protect high traffic areas on the playfield from wear.

Damn it! I just knew I should have consulted Wikipedia first thing when I got into the hobby. All those years I've gotten it wrong!

Keep the legs tight, check them periodically, important for any kind of table I'd say.

Lol! Not a chance.

My best advice is to purchase 100 pins so you can spread your playing time around and clean/maintain less.

Assuming this isn’t a troll post, saying table 3 times in the opener, then all the above advice is great.

Wipe it down whenever it gets dirty, you’ll eventually see ball trails, lines of dirt where the ball travels. Wipe it down when you see them.

Change the balls every year or two, more if you really play the hell out of it, something like 5k+ plays a year.

Don’t use millwax or silicone based cleaners, they’re crap. They leave white residue everywhere.

Best case is to READ all over. Search Pinside and read tons of threads, eventually you’ll pickup on common sentiments and then use your best judgment.

Congrats and welcome to Pinside!

You will find many different opinions on this subject.
Since you just got it (new or used) Blitz wax the playfield. Use very sparingly so you don't get it on all the mechs, posts, etc.
Clean rubbers from time to time with alcohol or naphtha. I personally HATE Novus. Much better products available.
For HUO change the balls once a year unless you are just playing the living hell out of it.
Also as others have mentioned just read through previous threads and you'll catch on. This is a great resource: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/cleaning-and-waxing-pinball-machines-vids-guide/page/41#post-7365140
As Forceflow mentioned Cliffy Protectors are a great way to protect your machine (see what I did there) and gain confidence working on your pin while installing them: http://www.passionforpinball.com
Have Fun!

Virtual pinball tables have no maintenance. Thank you, come again.

Not this again. Table is a fine word. Many people use it. Gary Stern has used the word to describe a pinball machine in interviews. Get over yourselves. Welcome new people to the hobby instead of being snobs and slapping their wrists.

I know of a couple people that call arcade games "cabinets" .

Enjoy your new machine.

"I thought I was the Bally Machine King..." from Tommy The Who
As far as waxing, the best I have found is P21S. The surface colors pop when I used this stuff. Expensive though. I so wanted to like Blitz
but it created, after buffing, little wax balls around play field, then there was the issue of the top not really fitting on the container. But as mentioned, stay away from Millwax and such. It is on my cart though, to basically take the oil off of new balls from Ball baron, (unless someone has a better/easier way to take the oil off)

Did somebody mention a pinball table?
IMG_0336 (resized).jpeg

BTW, I think the modern vernacular is “playfield” when referring to the surface covered with art that the ball travels on and where all of the mechanisms are mounted. Is this what you are asking about how to maintain, or the entire pinball machine in general?

Don't mind us. We argue about stupid things all the time. Don't take it seriously.
Have fun with your new table!

By your second post you changed table to machine so I would say you're off to a good start. Welcome to the sickness.

When I first really got into the hobby (2007), one of the big maintenance disputes was whether to oil mechs or not, and if so, how much and with what. I started out collecting EMs and lubrication was more common due to their higher use of mechanical devices (score motors, score reels, disc relays, etc.) and I would tend to restore (rather than just initially play) them. Currently, other than minor oiling as part of fine tuning games (spinners mainly) I typically don't do this as part of normal maintenance as my collection consists of modern games primarily.

Regular maintenance for me consists mainly of cleaning (and minimally waxing) the playfield including vaccuming it and the inside of the lower cabinet. Longer term, you'll need to replace rubbers, balls, coil sleeves, flipper coil stops, etc., as well as clean subways and ball troughs, but the frequency of this will largely depend on how much you play your game(s).

Minor repairs (loose connections, blown fuses, loose parts, etc. etc. etc.) and gameplay adjustments are a separate and common occurrence that should be expected as well.

Tables are flat.

A pinball machine is not flat.

People who say table are the same people who say queue up.

My 2 cents:

After unboxing, be sure to visually inspect the game above and below the playfield and check for any loose fasteners from shipping.

Since it’s a Stern, toss the balls it came with out as they wear very fast by all accounts. Ball wear is what most directly cause wear elsewhere. Be sure to clean any oil off the replacement balls with alcohol/windex before using them.

Wipe down the playfield with a microfiber cloth to remove any residue from assembly/packaging/transit.

Then you can fire up the game to make sure it works properly before doing any additional work on it.

You then enter the realm of optional things that you’ll get a bunch of different answers on. I know on my new games, I’ve switched them over to silicone (Titan) rubbers to keep the black residue from building up. As others mentioned, keep an eye on flipper slop/play as the coil stops Sten uses are very poor. On my GZ, I went ahead and replaced them with new Pinball Life just for piece of mind.

You’ve already done the most important things - came here and read and asked questions.

Welcome aboard the boat or table or whatever you want to call it here.

I like Lemon Pledge... makes all my tables shine

That song is also 54 years old. Circuit boards weren’t even in machines back then. There is plenty of common words from the 1960s that are no longer spoken in polite company, lol.

Things change.
EMs were very flat, and prewars were literally tables.
We’ve moved on.
Now games are heavily sloped and slanted and make very poor tables.

You might want to buy several coil stops to have on hand. I don’t know what the part number for the modern stern replacements are, but the coil stops from the factory are trash and will wear out on you probably within a year.

usually only have to replace coil stops and sleeves.And flipper Rubber.
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The small round nub on the coil stop will become loose thats time to replace it and the sleeve will develop grooves inside so replace that too and Your flippers will last a long time.