Not having been in 'the trade' I haven't generally worked on the more mainstream VHS machines, but as a collector I found the smaller, second generation of Philips V2000 machines to be a nightmare. To reduce the size of the machines, Philips literally crammed the PCBs and mechanics in place all around the case. A bit like looking under the bonnet of a modern car. Getting at PCBs and assemblies was a major dismantling job, so more often than not you could not access components
and operate the machine simultaneously. Perhaps Philips engineers knew what to do but I never worked it out. Pity, cos they were such lovely looking, dinky little machines and worked well - when the they worked. All the ones I owned were prone to intermittent faults. I'd get one working 'perfectly', leave the top off and use it for a few days, put the top cover on and it would fail
. In latter years I rewound high quality VHS tape onto V2000 cassettes and the quality and performance was nothing short of stunning. The relatively slow writing speed of the v2000 system demanded very high quality tape to obtain best picture quality, but ironically such tape did not appear until many years later (2000s) when tape manufacturers strove to help VHS manufacturers get the best out of their machines. The best picture quality I ever saw (apart from S-VHS) was my Philips 1702 machines loaded with the later, high quality tape.