I had an interesting experience when I bought my DVL-909 from Pioneer as a refurbished unit in 1999.
It worked fine until I bought the Mummy Signature Edition - Brandon Fraser. It would play side 1 but fail to spin up 2. This was the _only_ laserdisc it could not spin up side 2. It was still under warranty so I took it to a nearby Pioneer authorized service center (luckily I lived in California at the time) with the Laserdisc and demonstrated the problem. I took the DVL-909 home with a new spindle motor....

I had the same similar thing happen when I bought a DVL-919 back in 1999. It had a problem playing a DVD though (picture kept dropping out when playing it, and eventually stopping the player altogether.)

Took it to an authorized Pioneer service center with the receipt, and they fixed the problem in a few days. Like yours, they replaced the spindle.

Guess they shipped a few of the DVL models out with bad spindles.