[kiwi_steve]

Your neck of the woods is on my bucket list to visit...someday

Thanks Gary - your neck of the woods is on mine too - although I'm pretty sure I'm going to need my own UPS plane to get home with because there are so many amazing radios I see in YouTube videos of swap meets and the like over there that I'm bound to want to buy a pile of them... not to mention test gear - VTVM's, valve testers and the like hardly seem to come up here - but I see them on eBay all the time in the US for cheap-as-chips... If I do come over - I will definitely co-ordinate it with some kind of vintage radio swap meets so I can not only see what will fit in my suitcases but hopefully meet a few people and talk valves (thats tubes for you guys) over a beer or two as well.

No progress on the radio last night... late nights caught up with me... it might be the weekend before I get back into it now due to other commitments... we'll see... it seems so close now (if you don't suddenly remember the state of the cabinet I have yet to touch, or the speaker which I have not yet even tested)

In answer to your much earlier question about converting to a three wire line cord, yes, with this set you can connect the ground to chassis.  This is evident in your photo by the riveted ground clip on the back of the chassis to the right of the insulated antenna clip.  This is not always the case, but since it was intended to have a ground wire to earth you are really not changing anything.  The only possible disadvantage is that by grounding to the home wiring you could pick up "noise" from other equipment and appliances tied into the same ground network.  

Thanks for the reassurance regarding the earth connection.  The only thing I'm likely to get interference wise is the fluro light in the radio shack and the electric fence which provides a somewhat annoying static-crackle metronome in the background of all my radios (but its a small price to pay for not living in the middle of a city).  The worst noise was when I converted some of the lighting to LED.  I've got 1m (about 3') of LED strip lighting under the test-gear shelf over the bench running from a small transformer-based power supply I threw together because the switch-mode power supply units they came with were infinitely noisier than the fluorescent lights - I could barely hear stations through the noise!  Eventually I'll add more LED lighting and run it from solar and a battery...  another project for a rainy day  

Another flash-back - this is how I am remounting the sockets... it looks nice, but the valves don't sit flat due to the size of the bolt heads so I would like to rivet them - but I can't find any suitable brass rivets... I may machine the bots down at some point - I'll see how I go.

This is a newer socket from a parts chassis because the original one was broken.

[Image: http://i241.photobucket.com/albums/ff222...mnkkrl.jpg]

And the first valve in place - the good old 80... and you can see why the masking off of the chassis took so long in the bottom left corner of this pic - masking out the brass was fiddly and took a while, but I didn't want to paint it because its so nice and shiny.
[Image: http://i241.photobucket.com/albums/ff222...jrwop6.jpg]