[TV MAN]

Well, I believe I found the culprit and it wasn't what I thought. It wasn't even on the tuner board, after spending almost all the evening reflowing connections, I ended up finding the problem area on the IF board near the detector coil. I suspect they had problems previously, and how I missed the clue is beyond me. Notice the pencil glued to a capacitor and a bunch of glue all over? Yeah - a clue. So I found that only after warming up for about 5-10 minutes the signal would drop out accompanied by static. I originally thought it was drifting in the tuner area, but watching the tuning eye carefully realized the signal was fine, it was losing strength after the IF, dropping out of stereo and dropping the volume level. 

   

I found that I could push the detector coil (T5-small pic right beside the level control) with my finger - only after it got hot - and bring the signal back. I could even hear each stereo channel come in or drop out depending on how much I flexed the can. So - I resoldered the connections to the can. What happened?? I lost my signal level and couldn't get it back in at all. So - I hoped for a bad connection inside the can. Nope. Next I pulled the can from my parts radio - and, Oooh great... it's an 'Automatic'. Ya know, the SMD kind, right? What do I have to lose? I popped the can in and powered it on - it played ok. Not perfect, but good enough to test things and found the problem solved. I did an alignment of the coil and brought things in really nice.
   
     

So, as of right now, I believe the problem was the connections to one or both of the wafer caps in the base of the can. I suspect this has been an issue before judging from the hob-cob repair in the picture, but it adds personality, so it stays. I'll cook it for awhile and see if it holds. So far, it's been playing for over an hour with all the covers on.