Mouse ball got stuck in 1 direction, cleaning was not convenient

I had a situation that the mouse ball worked in 3 directions: left, right, down, but not up.
When moving finger up, the ball did not rotate under finger. So I could only use external mouse.

I wanted to fix this.
First I had to open the deveterm and take out the keyboard.
Then unscrew all 23 (if I counted correctly) screws on the keyboard.
To remove the PCB.
Then the mechanical part of the mouse device was finally free.
I took it out.
Top plastic part and bottom plastic part held together with thin metal part.
Ball is inside.
With a tiny metal knive I very carefully unattached the metal part from the plasic one without damaging anything.
With this I could take out the ball and the 4 rolling things.

There was a lot of dirt inside. I cleaned it as good as I could and then reassembled everything again.
Important to insert the 4 rolling things in the same orientation. It is possible to insert them in opposite, which would result in mouse movement rotated by 90 degrees, I think.

Now the mouse works again in all directions but still it doesn’t “feel” just as well as when it was new.

I wonder if others also had a similar experience with having to clean a stuck mouse.
In normal mouses with a rolling ball it is usually easy to open it, take out the ball and clean.
Here, I don’t see an easy way which doesn’t require so much inconvenient disassembly.

Running into this now, planning on tracking down a can of compressed CO2.

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https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005002988965317.html
Still not very convenient, but it’ll work like new or even better! I replaced mine when new and while still not perfect, it does work better.

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I bought one of these ones recently and the improvement has been night-and-day for me. It makes me wonder if my original trackball was defective or something, especially since some people here on the forum have downplayed the improvement.

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I also changed it because of the feel, the stock one is plastic and has a scratchy feeling, and the one posted above has a rubberized feel which feels more premium.

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