[Oldie Goldie]

Ok I took a tea candle and used it's metal cup for thin shim material.
Cut a long straight piece and put it inside the cup that gets bolted to the chassis. There is a deep wear groove in there where the three balls have worn in.

Worked perfectly for a bout a dozen turns. Than the metal disintegrated and was all chewed to bits.

Anyways, tired of spinning my wheels with that stupid tuning assembly, I satisfied myself with doing that fidelity mod to the tone circuit.
Lifted the ground of the twin capacitor (52) and indeed I got two new tone settings,
"No bass boost" and "light bass boost".

With the bass boost turned off, the thing wakes right up with chrisp highs. But if I turn the volume up too high I get a shrill zeeeeee! sound out of the speaker. Satisfied with the nondestructive experiment I resoldered the ground back to factory config.

I don't know what kind of small value cap needs to be in circuit if there is essentially no capacitor in the tone circuit when in no bass boost setting to stop that high pitch howling.

But poking around looking at the plethera of crusty cold solder joints and paper caps alongside new capacitors tacked in circuit with the Philco bake light blocks;
this radio is a game of Jenga.
It plays now but the circuitry is a sickening mix of original paper and Philco block caps, new modern caps of unknown brand slapped in, crusty cold joints, and bodge wires mixed with crumbling rubber wire.....it's waiting for something to fry up.

Oh and I bagged up the balls and spring for later...I don't know. But ironically the shaft won't come out now.