[old_tv_nut]

"BTW those two 12K resistors in parallel is how it was originally built and shown on the schematic. Two 12K, 1W in parallel
I'm thinking 5.6K or 6.8K wasn't close enough?"

Can you post the circuit? If the original resistors were 10% or 20% tolerance, there wouldn't be much advantage in using two for a nominal intermediate value. More likely they had 1 watt components available cheaper than small quantities of 2 watt - but that could depend on the particular circuit.