[morzh]

Shorted the wiper to chassis...Still have music and I also ran the VC thru it's full range just to see if anything happened. Nothing.

56.0 ohms from that cathode to chassis.

Bought the parts to put a new thermostat and housing gasket on the Ranchero. Decided to do it tomorrow. It was already 2pm. Sat on my butt the rest of the day. I don't usually do that. I'm not a TV person and I always need to be doing something. But I'm taking 5 days off from everything on the 20th and heading north to sit on my butt some more with my best friend. Haven't had a day off since the new year weekend.

Pepper

But you can tune? Or you cannot? If you cannot this pretty much means your Audio stage is your detector, and the RF amp, detectors etc don't do anything.

If you shorted the wiper to GND and it's still there - you can safely assume everything prior to this tube, and including this tube, is not doing much.

Do this: just yank the tube of that detector-amplifier.
Does it still play?
If it does, then yank the 1st AF 27.
And (hard to imagine, but) if it still does...there is nothing more to yank.
If it stops, there is no signal going from your Det. Amp to the 1st AF.

If you yank the det. and it stops playing - keep yanking in the opposite direction (towards the Antenna) until it stops playing.

Let's do that whole exercise first.