[Studio263]

My guess would be that the supply of "donor" machines will always at least match the demand (which is very small). In fact at the moment it seems to be greatly in excess, judging by the hoards of stuff that some people have. These aren't difficult machines to find.

However hard it is to debug an existing machine it's always going to be easier than making one from scratch, an error-prone process since most of it would need to be done by hand.

We have a 3D printing machine here, a proper one that cost more than a decent new car. The results are still disappointing, the resolution is poor and the things it makes are fragile. Machining from solid is still the way to (if you have the gear and the skills) if you want to make anything useful. Machining new parts to repair the existing stock of VCR machines is clearly the easist way to solve this problem, but that still leaves the issue of the heads...