Have you tried contacting Mirco? I would imagine they could address most, if not all of your questions.

No, there's no reason to. Plus, I've never seen anyone else do it much outside of the EM days. The bottom of the playfield is a working surface, not a finished surface that's on display.

Nope.

No need.

Maybe. My rule of thumb is to give a new playfield at least 6 months to cure in open air (take it out of the box). You'll never regret waiting, but you might regret not waiting.

No opinion. I've never done this on my 6 month+ aged playfields and never had an issue. YMMV.

How hard is STTNG to do a swap on? HARD. It's the worst one I ever did. SO MANY subways and diverters and things. Take it slow and take a LOT of pictures from many angles top and bottom as you strip it. When you think you've taken too many pics, you've only taken half as many as you should have.

Should I use a rotisserie? I never have, but for this particular one it would make it a LOT easier.

How can I get the best-looking ball guides? Invest in a buffing wheel and some rouge. Something like this:

https://www.harborfreight.com/8-inch-bench-grinder-39798.html

Take off the grinding wheels and use buffing pads instead:
https://www.harborfreight.com/3-piece-8-inch-buffing-wheel-set-46262.html

Put red rouge on one wheel and white on the other. Polish with the red, then finish to a shine with the white.

You can use this to polish posts, too. I use a drill turning the opposite direction of the buffing wheel and use the drill to turn the part as the wheel buffs. Cleans each one to a mirror finish in seconds. You can literally make the ball guides look like mirrors that reflect the playfield, too, and they will resist ball wear better. Note, you MUST wear good leather gloves and eye protection when doing this - the parts get hot and the lane guides can tear your hands up if you catch an edge and the wheel rips it out of your hand. Even with gloves, if that happens LET GO! Do not try to hold on.

This is 1000% spot on, especially with regard to doing the actual swap. TZ was the hardest one I ever did, and STTNG seems to have at least 30% more stuff on both sides. I would say the rotisserie is basically a MUST, and I find it helpful to have a work surface larger than the PF right next to it, so that I can lay the pieces down in the same location as they go on the PF. Even if you follow Victor's advice about taking photos, there will ALWAYS be one you need, and just didn't get the right angle or whatever. It really helps to have the parts, even small ones, in the approximate location so you can deduce what goes where.

I do also agree about letting it cure for a while. The clear is (usually? always? ) sprayed on in multiple layers; the lower layers take longer to cure apparently, so in letting it cure longer you have a more stable foundation and the soft lower layers won't cause a section to 'sink' lower. But if it's a Mirco, it's probably already been sitting for quite a while, so IMO you don't really need to go crazy on that.

Pre-drilling the clear is really helpful if you've had it re-cleared by Ron Kruzman, say - his clear is VERY thick, and you really do need to pre-drill - but again, Mirco isn't Kruzman, so you'd probably be ok. However, I would still do it just to be on the safe side. Most holes are fine, but occasionally you'll get one that has a lot of the clear dripped into it, and when you put your screw in, it puts lateral pressure on the wood and can cause it to split a tiny bit. Obviously you don't want that.

The last thing I'll say is to inspect areas of the game where something needs to fit in a routed out area, where the wood has been routed down and the clear sprayed on top. The routing is roughly square, and the mech would expect this, but the clear will cause that area to become rounded a bit, and the mech won't fit as precisely. You'll want to gently re-rout those so that the mech is sitting square. Not sure if that made sense or not..

Would it be best to have 2 rotisserie’s to make it easier to transfer parts from the old pf to the new pf?

Dishwasher the loom!

This is simply not possible, in MANY cases during the swapout, the parts that are removed last have to be installed first. The best thing you can do is take LOTS of pictures and use them in reverse order so you don't install parts that then have to be removed because they block the installation of other parts.

This is likely your best and only opportunity to do this. An emery flap wheel will do wonders at removing all of the ball marks from your stainless steel ball guides.

You also may want to take a look at the STTNG owners forum https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/forum/clubs-members-only there is a lot of good information here as well as some game mods you may want to be interested in performing during the reassembly; for example, if you are even thinking of changing your pop bumper color, this is the best time to do this as the lighting connectors run through every part of the pop bumper assembly and are stapled to the underside of the playfield. When I did mine, I just purchased new pop bumper assemblies https://www.pinballlife.com/williamsbally-pop-bumper-assembly.html in the color I wanted for $47 each rather than spending my time rebuilding them.

http://www.robertwinter.com/pinball/restorations/sttng/teardown/index.html

Great site that I used to supplant pictures I took when I did a swapout several years ago.

STTNG isn't as hard as some other games.... I remember Taxi being a PITA as you had to slide the ramps into the machine from either side at the same time, but that's probably because I didn't remove the PF from the machine, and the posts are all very similar heights. (shop out only not a swap)

Have you done a playfield swap on a STTNG?

I should be covering this game this week coming up it will utilize a Mirco replacement that I already perfected but the pictures and process should be universal and helpful
image (resized).jpg

B406E301-7C83-4401-A557-986948A9181D (resized).jpeg

IMO ... You would be insane to do this without one. If you only look at soldering ALL if the coil harness wires to the coils its worth it. You can build your own in an hour or so using only parts that are available at Lowes or Home Depot. There is really no excuse not to do this; this post contains more information on how to build your own https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/playfield-swap-without-rotissary/page/2#post-2901464 as well as Vids https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/vids-quick-and-dirty-rotisserie-guide

I did a Mirco Funhouse last year, and I had to drill out a lot of the holes on the playfield to get things to fit correctly. You may want to have a good set of new drill bits on hand when you do the swap.

This was my first post swap post covering mods I perfored during the swap...may be good to know info

https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/sttng-owners-club/page/4#post-2885291

If you ignore every post and link I made so far .... please do yourself a favor and replace this left orbit opto set.
https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/sttng-owners-club/page/10#post-3149626

I did it. It sucked. No argument there. Worst playfield swap experience I've ever done. I'm generally meh on rotisseries, but for this one, I can totally get behind recommending one.

Yes.

All WPC era games that are mostly lamp boards underneath are cake compared to the mess that is densely populated with individual lamp sockets interwoven with mechs and wiring harnesses that are 1982-1984 Bally and Williams games. Centaur was terrible since everything had to be perfect or it just wouldn't play right, and CPR's playfield spotting was way off down in the trough area.