Hehehe, pardon me as I run off to the print shop.
So that I can tell so far, I've already screwed up, ironically.
I was able to clean the rubber off by removing the screw on the top of the spindle and disassembling the latch but when it came to the sticking laser stop I had to get underneath the optical deck as up to now I was just pushing it open with my finger when the disc moved into place. The deck is mounted with three posts and three hex nuts. As it turns out if I had read the manual this step requires realignment once the deck has been moved, so sure the stop moves freely now but without the specialty jigs I have no way to realign the deck. Mother$*&@.
Also as it turns out there's a Ni-Cd battery mounted underneath the machine in the lowest possible place. Apparently the 1Kb of dump memory (the player can operate as a standalone device for interactive discs by data being stored in audio format at the the beginning of a disc in the Right channel) has a battery backup for power interruptions. Why it has this exactly I can't figure out as after a power failure you will need to restart the disc again anyways which would automatically reload the dump. Anyways a battery of this age is obviously going to be leaking and it's pretty easy to clip out.
Edited: Oh but this is kinda cool. While this is all the original DiscoVision livery, the internals have been upgraded to the Pioneer PR7820 Series III, which was the late revision just before it was discontinued. The two big things here is faster access times and complete support for all the available interactive DiscoVision titles, plus backwards compatibility with the older host interfaces.
One of the things included with the player was a print copy of the programming reference for the Series 3 revision. I have yet to find it online anywhere so I'm rather desperately trying to find a place to get it turned into a PDF.