I remember that my tape drive was a bit defective. Somehow, some games wouldn't work because the signal wasn't loud enough. My neighbor who was an engineer helped me with that. He added a jack connector to the drive in order to plug a headphone. Then there was a screw that could be adjusted in order to get a better signal. I had to tweak for a while to optimize the signal and finally be able to run my game.
The C64 also had a big transformer on the floor that I used to warm my feet in the winter. I think I was 8-9 at the time.
Eventually, I got the floppy drive who was quite big. We called it the "shoe box". But it was quite an improvement over the tape.
You never had to adjust the alignment of stepper motor in the 1541? The drive would "get out of alignment" because the copy protection on the commercial games would jam the head in the extreme edges of the drive. This was where all the noise the drive made while loading copy protected games came from. It's true that the device was generally highly reliable, but the user groups I attended had learn-to-align-your-1541 lessons regularly.