Thanks Wayne, that's interesting stuff!
So today I re-connected the chassis to the test jig again. First thing I did was measure the HOT current and it is running nice at 175ma. I am happy with that. And with the good HOT installed, I never get the drive line on the screen, regardless of how I adjust the H-drive control.
So then I still was not satisfied with the way the picture was presenting. I was having trouble with my ability to adjust the screen and background colors. And to add to the issue, with normal brightness I couldn't get the screen properly adjusted because it always had a pinkish cast. And when I turned down the red screen, my red color nearly disapeard in the video.
I checked voltages on the screen grids and they were looking within normal range, so I decided to start working my way back from the crt to see if there was a signal problem in the video. Sure enough I was getting very low signal on the red grid of the crt. Tracing back to the terminal board at the rear of the chassis where the crt cable connects up to, I found a bad 1/2 watt resistor in the red grid line. Should have been a 150K and it was over 3 megs. It was one of those poor quality resistors that have the rather coarse, rough looking body, not nice quality like Allen Bradley or Ohmite. I have found these cheesy resistors to be much more problematic than the good quality brands. Seems difficult to understand why RCA would allow the use of any poor quality components in their sets, when for the most part, they used good quality materials.
AFter replacing the bad red grid resistor, a beautiful picture developed with plenty of red.
IN the end I now have a very nice looking picture on the crt even without doing much setup work.
AFter the Cheltenham project is completed (after convention) I will post a writeup with photos on my web site. I will post a notice here when the Cheltenham pages are up.