Let me as an old fart preface this drivel of mine by saying that I am not meaning to ridicule here. In the art of restoring old radio gear there is no true pro, as a lot of the old knowledge may well be misplaced--if not altogether lost. I offer my knowledge to you with full respect as to your own knowledge as you have gathered it, and mean nothing else beyond this except to pass on what I have learned.
That said.....
If you know your tube basings you can actually do your alignment
without benefit of Sams--and also w/o an RF sig generator for that matter. Provided you have a good knowledge about the principles of radio operation, and that of the superheterodyne radio operation above all. The process of getting one of these old sets to "listen" once again is not at all hard to do, once you have the basics down pat.
Did it many a time when I was a snot-nose kid, as I could afford neither Sams nor equipment.
For starters I'd start doing an injection scan of the IF chain in a broadcast radio--once I'd ascertained the IF stage frequency. Most were 455. I'd start from the 2nd detector and work my way back up the line, using the last IF output from a working radio receiver as a source of RF signal at the appropriate frequency.
That was back in the '60s....
I then became "spoiled" by having the proper test gear.
Then years later in the mid '90s I was in the cellar of some friends of mine whose kid had gotten interested in fixing old radio. The young man at that time was like me as a kid--and didn't have a sig-gen, and was dealing with an old console radio where it was obvious that other people in the past had fust with the "loose screws" on the IF cans by "tightening" the bahstids.
It took me a few minutes to remember my youth. Then I asked the kid to strip down a working table superhet. Bug-eyed he did as I asked. I tuned the working radio to a strong local station, and then used its IF output at the end of the chain to work the older misaligned chassis from the back end to the front. I had it working in about a half hour or perhaps less time in diddling.
In dealing with antique radio one's best resourse is one's imagination.....
Where have I heard this before....?
