I've seen some BASIC code for "bumping" the alignment head, it's pretty short. I've never used it before, but I may give it a try. I need to take the drive apart first and give it a decent cleaning first, because it's in kind of ruddy shape.
Unfortunately, I don't have any purchased disks for it. All I have are a couple of C-64 formatted disks.
As for the age of the drive, it's the darker brown colour, but it's got a pull-down lever, not the "push in-and-up" original mechanism.