[jcassity]

the next thing i did was last night, i ran through the entire alignment process.

At this point have have a broken string on my dial needle and it occured to me that to make thing difficult on myself i should do the alignment the hard way.

example, and i am sure this is all basic stuff to you all but to me, im by myself with no one but this board for help.
let me know what you all think about the step by step i did below... i found it very interesting.
-at this point i have all my IFs peaked out. i had my speaker on and my meter set on millivolts.
-i set my volume knob up to make the meter show 100mv. (keeping in mind the advice earlier from Tbone)
-i followed step 1 and 2 of the instructions and peaked out the IFs and was able to achieve about 150mv after the last adjustment.
**step 2 isnt working all that well, its for the side band CW adjustement,, i will have to come back to that later... this will remain an open topic as i discover if its even worth my trouble. My S38d does a way better job as CW than this set is doing. From what i can see, apparently the S53a does not have a good CW function.

On to step 3, instructions say to set my needle to 1.5mc, my freq gen to 1.5mc then ajust some caps to peak the output.
wash rense and repeat using 600kc.
(i assume this is to ajust the low and high end of the broadcast bands).

so... i move on into step 3(A) setting up High end of broadcast band like this...............
-Open both the fine tune and major tune cap.
-turn on feq counter then connect it up to the set (through a 300ohm resistor at A1, and using chassis gnd.)
-rotate major tuning cap till my freq counter reads 15455000 and stays there steady as can be then disconnect.
-connect feq counter up to my freq gen and dial in a steady 1500kc then disconnect.
-connect freq gen up to the A1 and chassis.
-turn up volume till i hear the tone at the speaker and adjust volume control till the meter reads 100mv.
-peak the two caps per the instructions and observe the meter agrees with what i hear wtih a goal of increased voltage.
-turn down volume.

Step 3B (set 600kc low end of broadcast band............
-turn on feq counter then connect it up to the set (through a 300ohm resistor at A1, and using chassis gnd.)
-rotate major tuning cap till my freq counter reads 1055000 and stays there steady as can be then disconnect.
-connect feq counter up to my freq gen and dial in a steady 600kc then disconnect.
-connect freq gen up to the A1 and chassis.
-turn up volume till i hear the tone at the speaker and adjust volume control till the meter reads 100mv.
-peak the single cap per the instructions and observe the meter agrees with what i hear wtih a goal of increased voltage.
-turn down volume.

contine on with same process for remaining steps 4-7.

When i got done here is what i did last night.

i hooded my freq counter up to the set with the target station of 960AM band.
-hooked up freq counter and adjusted main tuning cap to 1415000hz.
-disconnect the freq counter.
-leave radio on but volume all the way down for the night for no other reason than to make sure its going to play nice and basically to see if its actually fixed or not.
My local station 960 washes out around 8pm at night and it seems to "Wash" back in around 9am.
MY expectations are that when i walk out in the morning to turn up the volume, I will expect to hear AM band 960 coming out of the speaker.

tomorrow has come and so the results are this.
I turned up the volume and i could hear 960 on the speaker and a tad of a sign i needed to move the main tuning cap a hair or two.

this was a test of sorts to see if my above process was possible and to verify if my work panned out or not.

now i can place the dial needle with confidence because i also verified a high and low end station was matching up to my frequencey counter.

thoughts?,,,, sorry so long.