My son spilled once half a can of Sprite on our 3DS. The day after, the circle pad was stuck in like all directions. A bit of chain oil sprayed beneath the circle pad worked out perfectly.

The exact same thing happened to my old 3ds.  You may think it's fixed now, but it'll come back to haunt you.  I just bought an XL and I hope the analog stick lasts longer this time...

This evening our 3DS XL died. I have two sons who love to battle for all sort of things. Now it was the 3DS, again. This was the result:



One of them already broke the back cover once and I bought a new circle pad like half a year ago. Now with the screen detached, you can still play, but I'm going to look for a new one next week. I will try to do a data transfer because there are 5 downloaded titles on it (MK7 among).
The three of us were good for 1440 hours gameplay in 2 years. Probably more than half of them were by my oldest son (6 years old). MK7 was the number one title with 552 hours. All three of us played it.  

Zepple wrote on 11/16/14 at 02:08:51:

That's why there's the 2DS

We have a 2DS and a 3DS XL at home, and I find the XL more pleasant to play on than the 2DS. The picture quality is better and I think the CPU is faster. I also think that a larger screen is better for my children's eyes.

The circle pad of our blue 3DS XL is worn out. It's harder to have grip on, the edges are gone too and you can bend the sides up or down. I'm pretty sure the plastic is broken underneath.   I'm going to order a new circle pad and will try to install it myself. I even consider buying a new 3DS and do a data transfer. My MK7 is a downloaded game and all my data is on that 3DS. In the meanwhile we still have a 2DS and I have a second hand MK7 cartridge. I bought that cartridge especially for having a ghost on MW NG lol. The circle pad works perfect on that 2DS, but I'm at 700 coins now and I still haven't unlocked slicks, red monsters and mushroom wheels