[jcassity]

Tbone
answers
-bare finger touching the cap lead on the vol ctl introduces speaker hum at a louder DB.
-multiple speaers used to verify oem speaker is not bad.
-open / close the phono-speaker switch produces proper affects.
-my IF T10 nearest the antenna reads 9ohms on both the pri and sec, i repaired the SMD part with new 100pf caps. Previous to this i had some degree of continuity from T3 pin 1 to T3 pin 3, now its fixed.
T11 and T12 both read 15ohms pri and sec and i dont see reasons to open up these IF's "yet" to rework the silver mica caps but we will see.

-placing a transistor radio near the hallicrafters S53 and tuned like you said produced the results you mentioned.

at this time i still feel compelled to replace the caps in T11 and T12.

i made a discovery a few nights ago that when i flipped to CW, i heard something on band 2 in the middle like Ham guys.
it was suggested a fiddle with the IF's to bring that receptions DB up a tad in volume and it worked.

i went back to the cw/am switch and picked AM on band 1.

in the middle somewhere i was now barely hearing a station with the volume at max.
In order of the manual operation i adjusted S1-S6 slugs in all three if and was able to increase the DB. with vol at max i can hear a couple stations but sound is like my volume is at like 15 or 20%.

wating on gear to arrive to continue.

I just settled on purchase of a siggen and a freqgen on ebay.

Fordham SG-490 Wide Band Signal Generator 0 KHz -150 MHz
Global Specialties MAX-100A 100MHz Frequency Counter