Actually, it was more bad caps- maroon drops!
I had a CTC-9 full of them that worked flawlessly, so I assumed they were at least as good as orange drops but I guess I was wrong. Or probably they were fine as coupling caps in the video path of a receiver, but they sure upset the sensitive timing circuits in this thing. There was slight DC leakage from the 31.5 and 15.75 sections, which was sporadically throwing off everything down river. You could hear it randomly changing frequency, and that made any sort of scope alignment impossible. Never mind the pictures of scope traces in the manual are ambiguous at best...
In the end I fashioned a low capacity probe for my DMM, because trying to read frequency directly was loading the circuits and changing the frequency. With a .001 cap and 100k resistor in series with the DMM probe, I was finally able to get accurate readings and went through the alignment that way. Next time I hooked it up, I saw that beautiful rainbow of color!
Seems pretty stable now, so on the shelf it goes till I need to use it on a set.
