[Adam]

This is a summary of what happened:

First I had changed all wax/paper and electrolytic capacitors, everywhere in the set, as well as a low voltage rectifier tube with an open filament and a weak RF amp tube and osc/mixer tube. It worked, but with bad vert. linearity, no difficulty hooking to the VCR, except it gets ch 5 on ch3 so I had to use ch. 4.

Then I changed R92, the 3.9K that only read about 2k. It did nothing for the linearity but decreased the vert. size too much, and the picture began to fold over on the bottom (it did this before, but I just had the size increased so that portion was below the screen)

I changed the vert out transformer, this increased the size and fixed the fold-over, linearity better but still bad.

At this point I wanted a strong signal, because it wouldn't sync vertically on a weaker one, so I hooked it to the VCR and found it got only a blank raster and sound. The voltage readings at the 1st and 2nd IF tubes were all ok, until the cathode of the 3rd IF which read 0 when hooked to the VCR. I had tried adjusting the AGC at this point and it didn't help. A resistor of approx. 20 ohms across the antenna terminals did, however with an antenna and not the VCR it worked better without this.

I changed the 2.2meg resistor R86, the linearity improved, but still not great.

I have a 20mfd electrolytic instead of a 30 at one end of the vert. out trans. (C2B), because I couldn't get 30 at 500v, but I put a 10mfd at 400v in parallel with it to see what would happen, and it made no noticible difference, so I removed it.

I changed that big thing with all the resistors and caps together going into the grid of the 6SN7, the vertical sync on weak stations improved, and the VCR / tuner problem went away, reception overall improved, and the picture had more contrast, no change in linearity.

I realized one of those magnetic rings around back of the yoke was loose, and I had had the horiz. width too high to compensate, the picture was way over to one side, so I had the width really high so it would fill the whole screen, with the width so high the vert linearity would only look good with a picture too big, after adjusting the rings and turning down the horiz width, the linearity now looks good.

I still get ch5 on ch3. The vert. linearity is good, not absolutely perfect, but good, actually the horiz. linearity is off a tiny bit, but not enough to be noticible. The VCR to tuner strangeness is gone. Thanks everybody for the information about this. At this point I'm really happy with the performance of this set, I have stopped messing with sets that work not as well as this, and I really don't need it to get ch3 as long as it gets ch4. I understand how my linearity problems came and went, if anybody knows what happened with the VCR, the tuner and those resistors and caps prior to the grid of the 6SN7 I would be very interested to know.