That's what I thought, if I use the deck for, say, thousand hours a year, I would need to have it looked over every five years or so.
But, how long do the reproduction heads last, assuming best tape and head cleaning every ten hours ? I would also treat the head with LAST tape head preservative. I do it now with Nakamichi before playing each cassette and as my tech said there was only negligible wear. The deck has thousands of hours put on it by me and I didn't buy it new, though it was used very little before.