Time for another update!
This weekend began much like the last, lots of hunting and not a single sign of any deer whatsoever. In fact, the only deer we ever saw was an already dead one in the back of a fellow hunter's truckbed. All that freezing for nothing, I guess.
Fast forward a few hours, and I went on down to the basement to get more work done to the chassis. I finished restuffing the last power supply capacitors, so they all have brand new caps living inside the original paper tubes now. I made sure to use plenty of adhesive, to keep them from bouncing around and possibly shorting. As soon as the glue had set enough to reposition the chassis, I flipped it up, double checked all my work by bouncing it off the schematic, and cautiously applied power for the first time through a heavy 20 ohm resistor in case the PTX was bad (variac is currently OOC).
Nothing happened at first- was the PTX actually bad? No, both fuses were blown. I replaced them with their rated values and tried again. Success this time!
I got B+ (380) and B++ (285), within 20 VDC of the values given in schematic. -20 VDC also looked good, if a few volts high. All tube filaments lit up, so that tells me the PTX is 100% good to go.
Just for kicks, I scoped the horizontal oscillator to see if anything besides the power supply was alive at this point. I was pleasently surprised to find a perfect waveform at the grid terminal of the HOT! Picture of the waveform is below.
All in all, not a bad day!