Eric:
That doesn't sound good! I have a '48 Zenith (see the second page of this thread for photo) that fried 2 5u4's in front of my eyes. I had to rewind a choke that had burned. 2000 turns and 4 hours later cranked up the variac and it did it again! After a week of digging I found the width coil slug had rubbed through the paper form and was touching a solder tab on the inside, thus grounding it through the slug frame. Talk about hard to find! Works fine now. Mind you the tranny may still be bad, maybe caused by something else and maybe not. I think I have a good one in a scrapped chassis, I will dig around to see if I can find it and check it for shorts. Once you are sure it is dead send me your address and I will send it to you gratis. As Rob says "I'll drop 'em in the mail no charge for an AK buddy".
Also, I picked up the sams for the older octal 13 channel T-54 for a buck at our Fall swap meet/auction Sunday, naturally now that I am nearly done with the D___ thing!
In the mean time here is a bad photo of the $5.00 T 505:
Photo is careful to NOT show that the case was used to mix paint on! It does show that somebody drilled a hole in the front above the tuner. Maybe for headset jack?! By the way, the speaker was missing on this set. The speaker out of the same scrapped RCA LOOKS like a direct replacement, just in case anybody is facing that prob.
Marlin