[glyphmon]

An update.

Today, using my new-old RCA Isotap II WP-27A, I did bring the chassis gradually up to full power.  To my great relief, all of the magic smoke stayed inside and I was able to get a couple signals.

While I know it is a poor setup, at the moment, I have a long wire coiled into a ball.  This is something that I do intend to get mounted to the side of the building (insulated on both ends, as I've seen).  For testing purposes, I also have a AM transmitter in my office where I'm working on this radio, and a Bluetooth receiver plugged into that.  I was successfully able to stream from a laptop to the Bluetooth receiver, and have the receiver's audio sent out on AM - approximately 1630 kHz - and the radio picked it up and did a reasonable job playing it.  I was also able (especially when making physical contact with my antenna ball) to receive - though not great - a local radio station about 10 or 12 miles away.  A very faint more distant station came in as well.  The lower shortwave bands were completely silent for me, but I did pick up a couple faint stations on the upper shortwave bands, including one that sounded like it was in Spanish.

So, I feel reasonably good about the fact that it is both receiving and making sounds.  I feel very good that nothing seems to be burning up either.

I think my next stage will be to do the alignment on it to the best of my abilities.  I also got my new-old IG-102 signal generator.  I need to order a lead for it, and I am also waiting for the capacitor to come in to put inline with the connection.  From a number of the videos I've seen, though many radios do work after recapping, the alignments seem to make a big improvement.  Since I changed all the caps and resistors, I'm sure there's some adjusting that could help.

Once I've done the alignment, I may follow up with some additional questions if I still think there's improvement to be gained in the output, which there probably will be.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed to me not completely botching this chassis so far.

A video of the first song I streamed to it is available here (Mike, don't watch, there's a dim bulb tester in here you don't want to see).
https://youtu.be/tmjOuJ0Lx7M
If you can't hear the music, it's because of copyright.    Maybe next time I'll try classical music.

Best wishes,
Roy