My Second Radialva Groom Restore

[Geaney]

Bit of an update - I finished off the wiring and gave it it's first power up. Lots of howling and high pitched noises. But nothing went bang, caught fire, or otherwise set things back seriously. By a happy coincidence I had been browsing Chas Miller's great repair book a few nights earlier so the topic of phasing was fresh in my mind. Because of the physical construction I had fitted my coils in a different orientation to the originals. I swapped over the connections to the output transformer secondary and all was quiet apart from a slight buzz that varied with volume. Touching the grid of the 6Q7 gave a nice audio buzz through the speaker so I couldn't resist feeding some audio to it. It was with a certain excitement that I heard the set blare out some Glenn Miller at very respectable volume and with no distortion. Touching the aerial causes changes to the audio output so there is some level of continuity through the set. Still tons to do as my problems are clearly in the RF/IF stages and there's no guarantee I'll get there in the end - but one is suitably motivated to persevere!
For the speaker connection I just added a 2.5K resistor in series with the field coil and for now that seems to work fine. I will experiment with the other suggestions you guys made if and when I get the set working properly.

My first valve scratch build - so far so good!

Cheers, John