I have pretty much confirmed it now, this putz has made a mess of this set, and it will be very hard to set right.
The IF is messed up and wont pass color, any that does get through, is so weak that the color circuits cant process it. Any color seen via the the tuner is so faint ( seen as barber-poling) you can hardily see it on the screen.
I have found and fixed 4 mistakes on the color PCB , so I can only assume that when they first tried to fix this and did not notice/ check their work they then turned their attention to the IF pcb , and made things worse, gave up, then donated this TV to the place where I found it .
When I try to insert direct video at the 1st amp, I get a MUCH stronger color signal to the color circuits and very pronounced color barber-poling on the screen, but I'm still unable to do the color afc setup that way because the sync/ afc is unstable, this is most likely due to that I'm feeding feeding in composite video ( 1v p2p) at a point where it should be 3.5.
dvd input
https://imgur.com/IMh054m
So now I have few options, try to find a way to get the IF un-messed up ( aligned ) so the color setup can be done correctly, or try a video amp and hope it stabilizes things enough to let me do color setup.