[kiwi_steve]

Anyone have any thoughts on the hum problem?

Actually, never mind   slight miswire on my part... if you look at the photo of the completed small cap can above I've used 2 resistors in series to get the 2.9k shunt for the shadow meter... and wired it into the wrong place  .

Fixed, and now the hum is gone... but the meter isn't reading properly... but the vane was jammed up with wax - I suspect its been hot and some wax from the coil has seeped down into the vane assembly... weird... but I've cleaned it up as well as I can and it works sort of... but it slams to one side (only one side) when there is no signal and it jams there and won't come back - its also very sluggish when I manually move it to the right spot and move on and off frequency... and I don't know if thats residual wax I can't get to or if its lost magnetism... I'll pull it apart and clean it up properly and remagnetise it as a matter of course...