I bought the service manual from
www.antiqueradioschematics.org. It has instructions for aligning the tuner with a signal generator and a VTVM, but nothing on using a sweep frequency generator. Aside from that it's fairly complete and will allow me to put together a bill of materials for replacing paper and electrolytic capacitors.
This will be the first furniture refinishing project I have done in many years... all the TVs I have picked up have been either plastic case, or in more or less mint condition. This one needs new finish, it's got surface cracking and various nicks and scratches, much more than I can deal with using furniture polish. Luckily it has a metal control panel, so no pesky decals to replace or otherwise deal with. The grill cloth is also in excellent condition. I have no idea what kind of varnish to use on the cabinet. I want to avoid the ugly glopped on polyurethane look which I have seen on a lot of bad restorations. I am thinking about disassembling the cabinet, then using a chemical furniture stripper, followed by a very light sanding, re-glue loose parts, wood filler, stain, and shellac to add some shine. I have had pretty good luck with natural shellac in the past, it's a forgiving product to work with and looks nice.
The original changer was a Collaro - one of those horrible ones with an idler drive change mechanism. I am kind of glad it's not present, it means I don't need to mess with it! I am still not entirely decided what sort of a record player the console will get, but it's going to be single play and have a stereo magnetic cartridge. I mentioned an Optimus I have sitting around, which seems ideal because it has a built-in RIAA preamplifier - it's kind of ugly though.