Jj haha,
Oh I really tried ,I love electronics,I just don't have your experience. I made a boo boo in reading 2 colours on a resistor, Ian found it for me ,
The unit is in use every day and sounds great .

Pete

I have found those Mica's & the open clamped type late 30's to be very reliable & rarely change them as they rarely fail. The only set where I had to change the lot got struck by lightning. Astor RK

Do not touch the often unmarked ones on coils. They were put there to resonate the coil, or correct band spread when it was made.

My 10-valve radio has exactly the same valve sockets as that radio of yours. The socket for the 12AU7 had an internal broken pin, which caused all kinds of crackles and volume changes. It took me many years to get around to replacing that socket, but it proved the point - all the noises were gone, just clean sound.

Hey guys I just want to say thanks to everyone for their input (pardon the pun). Especially Ian and Vintage Pete. I will let you know how I went with it. Cheers!!!

Valve sockets are a mixed bag. That's why I have spares. I normally replace OP tube & rectifier sockets with ceramic as those do like to get seriously hot.

Just heard from Shane via email and he has fixed it , It was the Mica Caps !!!!!! hmmm so was mine in my 11 77 ......

Interesting, Mica's do fail American SM ones being the worst. As noted I have not replaced many. Silver Mica can have Silver migration as it grows whiskers like your face: Zinc, Tin and a few others similar. The ones with HV DC on them, tend to be the worst offenders.

Well its 60 years old so I guess you can no longer count on them . ,But I had to replace mine too . mIne was a full rebuild I replaced all caps and resistors, Should out last me now.

pete

It is actually interesting to note what fails in several hundred radios from the start to the finish of the valve era, wandering across the repair benches do show trends. Up to around the mid thirties, Mica caps here got reliable and some types never seemed to fail that often.

Various resistor types did fail often however, this tended to decrease with better carbon types, however there are exceptions & with some in the latter fifties, you would get runs of duds & you looked at sets you knew had them with trepidation. I am not sure when the Heathkit OS-1 came into being but its parts were of such crap that I cleared the printed circuit board, even the stick rectifier on EHT died.

Krieslers are some thing like two in perhaps eight, to ten, might have a working speaker transformer. Whilst HMV were generally built well; They had a black tarred speaker transformer in some & they had an attrition rate as well as commonly resistor issues. Another quirk was the "Nippers" of the fifties. At one point (R22?) was two 22K in parallel for the RF screens. Later this changed (accounts dept. ?) to a single 10K Resistor. Don't quite know what was going on there, but some had what looked like 1Watt. It often died as I squared R, exceeded 1 watt.

There are other idiosyncrasies, like why plate resistors on 6B8 etc.Det 1st AF, constantly fail, as do the ones on control grid (g1) of many output valves like 6V6 & 6F6 constantly go high to the point where you never leave them unchecked.

Then come the Waxed Paper & some "oil filled" caps. Find one decoupling over 50M, or 200M coupling a plate to a g1. Rated voltage applied: Not likely to happen. If it leaks here its a dud.