Making some good progress! I fully recapped the chassis with the exception of two ceramic encased paper caps I have on order. The set appears to be quite stable with them left alone, so I am not worried about them for the time being.
I restuffed the electrolytics, reused the bases by drilling out the terminal lugs and feeding the legs through. Worked quite well! Turns out the 40uF section connected to the output of the rectifier tube was indeed bad and leaking, so the redplating 5U4 issue is solved. I don't think I will bother trying to glue down the tops, the set isn't really rare or super valuable and I'm fine with them as is.
Cautiously powered up the set post-recap, and I got a raster! Super out of whack, as I was fooling with the picture controls to clean them, but it didn't take much to dial in. I initially only got a blank screen with weak static, however some wiggling of the tuner got my DVD player/test pattern generator's picture coming in loud and clear. I'll clean up the tuner soon.
One annoyance I've encountered is the fine tuning. This set originally had a knob sticking out the back, but the previous owner evidently snapped it off at the base and I did not realize this until taking a look at the Sams. I've been jamming a flathead into the remnants of the stem, and while it works, it will be quite inconvenient when the set is all reassembled. I'll figure something out.
The picture tube is showing its age, the brightness needs to be cranked up quite a bit for the picture to come through properly and contrast mostly washes the picture out, but with enough fiddling I can get a pretty good image. I'm not too worried, won't be using this set as a daily watcher or anything like that.
Overall, very good results! It appears all crucial components are in good working order. I did make one really stupid mistake, though - the audio tube is a 6
AQ5, not a 6BQ5. I have no idea how I made the conscious decision to test the 6AQ5, which is a completely different size and uses a different base, with the settings for the 6BQ5...I re-tested the tube with the correct settings, and it's fine. On the bright side, I guess I have a tested-good 6P14P for the tube stash.
