Zenith MJ1035 volume pot question

[Jeffhs]

I pulled the chassis of my Zenith MJ-1035 radio the other evening, with the intention of getting the volume control working as it should. (The radio works, and well; gets lots of stations in my area just using a piece of wire on the antenna terminals, as I can tell by the stereo indicator, but I can barely hear it with the volume control at maximum.) No luck so far, so I think I'm going to substitute a 1K pot from my junk box for the 2-megohm dual pot already in the set. Will I get any audio at all, or am I risking damage to the audio output transformer or tubes (two 50EH5s with a 12AX7 preamp) by using a much smaller pot than the schematic calls for? I am not interested in stereo sound from this radio at this time; I would simply like to get it working monophonically. Once it does work well in mono, then and only then will I tackle the problems with restoring the other stereo channel (the speaker for which plugs into an RCA jack marked "left channel speaker socket" at the rear of the chassis).

If this is a duplicate post, I apologize, but it seems that my last post got lost when all threads were moved to the new Videokarma.org sub-site of AK. I think my original thread was lost because, when I logged on to Videokarma.org, I was greeted with the message: Welcome, Jeffhs. You last visited: 08-19-2009 at xx:xx pm. (I don't recall the time of that particular post offhand.)

Thanks in advance.