[Groundhog74]

This set has been on the back burner for a while. I have been stripping the cabinet off and on as weather and time permits. Other than a little loose veneer, and some chips in the sides at the back edges, it's not too bad. I stripped off the photo finish junk. It was pretty rough and I hated the color. Actually the wood underneath is figured decently and I believe once finished, will look nicer than it did with the fake stuff. As this set is pretty common, I'm not worried about absolute originality. I found a site that offers unbacked veneer "sampler packs". I'm going to order one of those as it looks to be enough walnut "sample" to do what I need, and if it's too thin I think I can double it up.
I had used some electric motor cleaner on the switches...because it's what I had. It helped some. Took forever to dry. Yesterday I found some deoxit (?) contact cleaner. It is a red color. After spraying down the switches with that stuff they work pretty good now. I made a tuning dial pointer for it out of some really thin aluminum sheet that came out of an old laptop case. Painted it red with some leftover red touch up paint that I had from the wife's Miata she had a few years ago. Looks great too. The set was working, but low on volume. I did a little "freestyle" aligning (I have no test equipment yet) and now the thing works pretty well considering I haven't re-capped it yet. No hum. Still need to re-string the dial. That'll be a weekend project.