Pioneer CLD704 tray won't eject

Got a CLD704 from Pioneer, original owner, that seems to have stopped ejecting/loading discs. I was playing a disc last night and let it finish normally, but when I went to eject the disc, the LED display showed Open but the tray did nothing. Power cycling didn't help, nor did unplugging the unit.

I got the top off and was able to get the disc out and, gently, played around with some of the components. The head mechanism still functions normally but the spindle was stuck in the "up" position. After unhooking one of the boards I was able to get to the tray motor and discovered that it does double duty as both the tray drive and moving the spindle up and down. I manually got the spindle into the down position and then manually ejected the tray. But the mechanism will still not load the disc. I suspect the motor is dead but I'm surprised the motor would just stop functioning like that without any warning.

Anything else worthwhile trying? I doubt I'm going to be able to find a replacement motor for it-

Got this working - sort of - The motor's not dead. I gently rotated the head so that the laser pointed downwards (B side) and when I powered the LD back on, the head retracted and then rotated back towards the A side and !!!! the tray motor engaged and tried to eject the tray but couldn't. I removed the tray to get a better look and played with a bit a more and surmised the problem was because I had manually lowered the drive spindle so I manually reraised the drive spindle again and after some experimentation figured out how to get the tray back in with the gears setup in the right positions to fully open/close the tray. Ejected the tray, plopped in an old disc I didn't care about too much, loaded it into the player and voila it played! Whoo-Hoo!

Well, not quite -
The original problem still exists -
I can play a disk on A side or B side, stop at any time and eject the disk without incident. But if I let the player play through the entire B side and auto stop, something doesn't mechanically get back to where it should. The LD player will then NOT eject the disc, if you attempt to and then never perform any other operation until I return the head to the B side position again and start it up. (BUT, when it gets into this state if you hit Play, the drive rails will raise, the head will attempt to play but can't as it's hitting something, the drive rails will drop then the tray will attempt to eject, but can't because the tray is hitting something, then the drive rails will raise again and re-engage the disk.

If I press eject NOW, the drive rails will drop properly and the disk will eject without incident. When I load a disc now, the first play will fail (as if the head can't read the disk but I can't hear the drive head move) and eject the disk again... but I can now reload the disk again and **everything works fine** (unless I let the disk go all the way through the B side again).

I suspect I have either a head alignment problem or the drive rails aren't raising/lowering properly all the time.

Anyone have any suggestions to try/explore? I can live with this (if it doesn't get any worse), but it'd be nice to get it back into 100% operation.