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This is my opinion. I believe we are caretakers of the really rare and scarce prewar and postwar sets. Every attempt should be made to document your restoration, pictures etc. I believe there is nothing wrong with cleaning of the cabinet and chassis. Although when I got a rca 8ts30 years ago I vacuumed inside the cabinet and sucked out the loose RCA label. Luckily I learned on a not so rare set to be more careful next time. Also if there are any parts missing such as knobs, grill, mask, transformmer then finding or making substitutes is OK. Now the grey area: every attempt should be mantained to keep all the original parts except the insides of capacitors, rotted wood etc. If capacitors are to be replaced then stuffing the old ones should be the first option. In the course of our collecting we will all have dozens of TVs so why must everyone be made to work? We all agree that we wouldn't put a LCD into a prewar tv but if I found a TRK12 mirror in the lid empty cabinet I might put one in until a chassis came along. Whatever is done should not harm the originality of the set. I once thought about taking the built-in bubble off my Automatic tabletop and putting it on my Automatic console but decided not to do it. The front of both sets match and I have never seen an Automatic console with the built-in bubble but have heard from one collector who claims to own one. This would have been reversable as long as I had both sets. I'm glad I didn't do that switch.
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