[Arran]

I think that the only sets that I owned that always worked well, without service, were three way portables thanks to the cool running battery tubes not baking the capacitors to death. I was going to say a farm battery set but I never really ran those consistently enough to know whether they would die or not. Not dying is a different thing entirely, I have had lots of sets that would still play, didn't die, but ran like crap so that they were deaf to all but the strongest stations. The sort of sets that used to be reliable, such as those with disc caps, are often coming down with mica cap issues in the IF cans now.
Happy Christmas
Happy New Year
Arran