RCA VLP-950HFT....save it or finnish it off?

[StarquestMan]

I recently got an 86' rca colortrack 2000 and have been thinking about getting a VCR for watching some older movies and thought it would be cool to get a vcr to match the set and be compatible with the digital command center remote. i ended up getting a hitachi made rca vlp-950hft (one of those high end "convertable" vcrs that hooks up to an external video camera) thinking surely the thing would be better than my "crapnavox" dvd/vcr combo of course now im thinking the magnavox may be the most serviceable and well made vcr of the two!

once i got the thing after having to pay extra for shipping i opened it up to find what i had kinda expected in a unit its age, melted belts so i replaced all 3 with an mbk-80 belt kit from sound studio electronics and thought i was up and running but i still had a long way to go! there was no display on the vacuum florescent display and none of the buttons on the unit did anything so i opened it up and found that one of the fuses in the thing (one of 7 or 8 in the damn things in the unit!) had blown so i replaced it and now the machine would play ok and the leds and lcd screen on the tape player itself would work but the base unit was still totally dead. then i noticed that one of the corners of the power supply pcb was broke completely off that had a large ground trace running through it so i repaired that and replaced one open capacitor and all the test point voltages were fine after that but still no life from the base unit. i also should mention that all of the boards are covered in that stupid brown glue that darkens and becomes conductive over time that all of the cheap Chinese company's love to coat everything with

so after that i was starting to feel pretty lost and was just blindly testing caps and cleaning crusty brown the glue off of the pcbs. i found one capacitor near the main proccessor that had leaked and the ribbon cable connectors had corroded and was flaking bits of platting everywhere. after that was fixed the damn thing still didn't work so now i was to the point of just blindly sticking my hand in and poking the live traces with my finger that was actually making the vu meter and some segments of the clock to illuminate at various brightness's depending how hard i pushed. so after more fiddling around that flaky ribbon cable must have finally seated and the whole thing started working!

so now the thing seemed to work pretty well so i decided to clean the heads and tape path but then i started getting this static that would scroll down through the picture every second or two through the picture on some known good tapes. i guessed that somehow one of the heads must have clogged so i tried cleaning it again with a piece of paper and alcohol but this time used a slight gentle upward movement to remove any deposit's from the head gaps and it seemed to work! but i noticed that when watching a movie the picture just wasn't as good as it should be and i guessed maybe the tape had some oxide build up from age so i tried putting the tape in the newer magnavox with the lid off and cleaning it with a lint free alcohol pad by running the tape on fast foward as i had seen someone do with great results. after that it played very well on the magnavox (way way better than the rca). so i put the tape back in the rca and the scrolling static was back by now i had had it with the piece of crap that ive got about 80-85 bucks into and let my frustration get the best of me and smashed the top of the control panel on the unit. so now i guess what im left with is a high end vcr with bad heads and a um "defective" control panel face. these are kinda rare from what i understand so there isn't a whole lot of info on these things and im wondering whether this is i good vcr worth trying to source parts for or should i just cut my losses and take a sledge hammer to the thing?

edit: i just came back to the machine now that im in a better mood lol and un-bent the cassette basket that got bent and stuck a tape in. the scrolling static has gone away go figure im now wondering if i didn't wait long enough for the alcohol evaporated the picture is better but not quite as good as the magnavox of course this thing im sure has many more hours than the magnavox. maybe ill just have to keep my eyes open for a face plate from a parts unit on ebay and just get a new upper head assembly once i figure out what model number it takes and i can find one cheap. im still curious how this unit stacks up against other units and common problems these things may have? also does anyone know of any good reading on vcr's and the tricks the pro's used to use to fine tune and troubleshoot them? google is full of short articles on how to do a basic cleaning but not a whole lot on the more in depth stuff