[WallaceRoger]

It looked kind of homemade to me too, and the soldering around it is sloppier than the rest. It is separate from the parts I've labeled in green tape with the numbers (those are the solder points for the battery plug wires, which were in the way and I removed for now).

This "thing" is soldered directly to two of the pins of the 3Q5 tube, and seems to be joined by a very thin filament of copper wire wound around the object itself several times, but I'm not seeing any such part on the Continental Radio schematic in this location. It's almost like someone's idea of a wire resistor, but there's really not enough wire there to do much resisting...

I do suspect someone has been in here before, as there's a mixture of older cloth-covered wire (still in decent shape) and rubber covered wire (crumbling to bits). And some ancient electricians tape over one end of an old capacitor.