Replacement Combo Drive not ejecting discs

Hello ☺️

I picked up a lovely MacBook 3,1 from eBay a couple of months back to play around with. One of the issues it had was a broken optical drive (Combo drive) which meant I couldn't install Snow Leopard from the included disc. So I sourced a used replacement drive from eBay and followed the iFixit instructions to replace it (MacBook Core 2 Duo Optical Drive Replacement). And, despite how bad I am at repairs, it seemed to work! I could install Snow Leopard fine. Yay!

However, now I'm having issues when both burning discs and just playing regular CDs, DVDs, etc where the eject process doesn't work. It just sort of grinds away for a while making 'eject noises' and then starts reading the disc again as if I just inserted it for the first time. Only a lot of troubleshooting (restarting with the trackpad key held down, etc) manages to force a disc ejection. It still reads and plays CDs and DVDs, etc, so the drive seems to work. But I wondered if there might be something misaligned when I installed the new one that is causing an issue when trying to eject, or whether this is likely just the eject motor in the replacement drive now failing?

I was feeling so good about that repair as well. 🥲