alt Hacker NewsThe previous owners of my apartment left a VCR behind. I think it's from the mid-90s, but I'm not sure. It didn't work very reliably, taking time to turn on and sometimes shutting off when e.g. spinning up the video head. But my hands were itching to fix something, so, after all these years of putting it off, I replaced the capacitors in the power supply section, and now it works about 98% of the time. The remaining 2% is the mechanism sometimes locking up when switching between playing and rewinding. Still proud of myself, heh.
My own impressions after taking it completely apart (you have to, to get the main board out) and putting it back together, is that the engineers who made it definitely did so with repairability in mind (the service manual is very detailed and way above my level of understanding of electronics), but it was also made to a price point. A high one admittedly, but it's still not nearly "no expense spared" level of robustness.