Vintage DD turntables. Are we living dangerously?

Conversely I've been in to a lot of units for various reasons that appeared to be working fine that weren't.  The good DD circuits are great at compensating for all kinds of ills.  I've seen grossly miss-calibrated drives where the motor was fighting itself, and the owners heard no audible ill-effects. 

Every SP-10MKII/2A/3 I've been in has had physically and electrically leaking caps.  The ones that would still spin seemed to spin fine, even though upon measurement they were clearly unhealthy.

Some fare better, some worse.  The bottom line for me when doing a refurb is that the average life of electrolytics is well established, testing each one isn't worth the time, and there's no way to predict when a cap may become marginal or flat-out fail.  Failed or failing caps don't always physically leak or vent. 

I've never been an advocate of shotgun parts replacements in place of fault-finding and repair, and do caution amateurs that doing so can cause issues as they may indeed cause other failures in the process. 

Once in a great while I do end up eating some hours when replacing known problematic parts due to other failures.  It's rare and I don't charge for that time.

This isn't my day job, and my primary motivators are to ensure pieces leave performing at least to factory new levels, and to do everything within reason to ensure I never see a unit come back. 

Laying here on the couch listing to Alice Cooper muscle of love vinyl on my 1976 DD turntable and liking it a lot. Yes I'm the original owner, never had it serviced and had it in storage for a few years (controlled environment) It may be that I'm very fortunate or lucky. I do agree with Lewn that sooner or later something will go wrong. I think he thinks in preventative measures which is sensible. I don't take his thought as terrorizing at all. The only regret I have reading this thread is that now I'm actively looking at tables that may replace the vintage table when it's time has ended. In any case I will have benefitted greatly from it's many years of service and I can tell anyone here it will be very hard to replace.  

I think the point of this thread, most of all, is that we don't have to give up on our vintage DD turntables purely for reasons of their having aged into obsolescence and unrepairability.  In general, they can be brought up to date functionally, and they can be repaired if malfunctioning.  In other words, we are not living dangerously.  Prudently, maybe, but not dangerously.

@chakster News for your TT101?

My TT 101 did not solve the problem of power loss with the slowing of the revolutions.

I heard the repairman a few days ago and he seems to want to give up; too much time lost to solve the problems that have been solved at 99% (I entrusted him to him in July 2017) too many hours spent and an expense account that could rise dramatically even more if you had to keep looking where the defect is .

So many welds are reworked and redone, but the problem remains, no capacitor replaced, his thought does not accuse the capacitors for this problem; 100 may be the reasons for this last flaw and from what I understood the problem could also be in the engine.

Without a working TT101 to have on the side to make the measurements it becomes impossible for him to go on; even the service manual does not help him, he says it’s bad,  there are no all indications for the measuring and calibration points, there are no indications to solve the problems such as the drop in laps; the service manual of the simplest Technics SP 10II is much better.

I’m desperate to hope to bring it back to life before starting my restoration :(

@best-groove 

I was lucky because my second TT-101 which i bought as a donor was better than first one! Actually it is working, but to start the platter i have to touch it by my hand, and then everything works just fine. Funny, i bought this turntable as a junk. 

My first TT-101 that i bought as working unit (not junk) and paid more for it, does not work correctly (as it was described earlier), i mean it works fine, but only for 30 minutes (more or less) and then turned to "stand by" mode when the platter stops energising.

-The JVC Victor service in UK is one of the options, and communication is good. 

-German service is another option, but the communication is not that good. 

-JPjones is propably the best option, but he's in NYC 

-There is another person who can fix it, but too far away in Australia.