[rfeenstra]

All tubes checked, installed, and slowly powered up.  Stations all across the dial, though low volume and distorted.  At least I had something to work with.  I discovered the wiper contact on the treble control had a low resistance short to ground.  This caused the bias on the audio driver tube to vary from -14v to ov as I turned the selectivity control.  Fixed that and the radio works great... almost.  One dead band (1.5-7.6 mHz band).  The oscillator dies and there is total silence.  Before I reassembled the tuner chassis I had checked all coils and all measured ok.  I hope I don't have to remove and disassemble the tuner chassis again to find the problem!  It's a pain and it would be difficult to test without reassembly.  Otherwise, it tuned up great and performs admirably.  It's nice to have a signal first shot out of the box.  It gives you something to easily troubleshoot.  I think this will perform as good or better than my Scott 16.  The magnetic tuning is interesting and works quite well.  Once it locks into a station, you have to tune quite far off to get it to lock into the next station.