[Jeffhs]

I had a Zenith radio like yours about 25 years ago, a thrift store find. All it needed was a fusible resistor to get it singing again, and it worked very well all the time I had it. Should have kept it. I didn't realize, however, that the dial lamp was originally hard-wired (didn't have to replace the one in mine). It seemed strange that this radio would be designed with a hard-wired dial light; seems to me to have been out of character for Zenith, especially during the late 1940s-early fifties when this set was made (I believe yours, and the one I had as well, were made in 1949). I don't think it would have added that much to the price to have designed this radio with a socketed dial light from the start.

You have an excellent radio. All Zeniths from that time frame (1940s through at least the sixties) were excellent performers, and were built on solid metal chassis with no design shortcuts to minimize problems. I have four Zenith tube-powered radios from 1951 to the early 1960s and all work well, even with the original caps (haven't had to replace a filter cap in any of them--yet, though my MJ-1035 could stand a new one, as it has a slight hum that's been there since I got the radio some four months ago).

Your set should last years, now that you have new caps in it. The capacitors in older radios are almost always either already bad or going bad, especially the 3-section electrolytic in the power supply. I wouldn't be too concerned about replacing the tubes, however, if the radio still works. Many of these older sets go for years or decades with most of their original tubes; my four Zenith tube radios have their original tubes for the most part, and the sets still work great. The only time I would replace a tube in one of these sets would be if the sensitivity were dropping (to the point where the radio won't even get local stations) or I was starting to notice problems with the audio; otherwise, I'd leave the tubes strictly alone. "Retubing" old radios, that is, replacing old but usable tubes with new ones (especially "shotgunning" the entire set, i.e. replacing every tube even though only one may be defective), is generally unnecessary unless you want to restore absolute peak performance.