[Eliot Ness]

If you want to keep the original appearance you could re-stuff that original capacitor tube with a modern capacitor and reuse the same wire for the winding.  In fact, if you're careful you could possibly melt out the old cap without disturbing the inductive winding on the outside.  I think those combination capacitor/inductors are pretty cool looking and not extremely common.

On-the-other-hand, as Squire said, it would probably work fine eliminating it entirely and just using a modern capacitor by itself. 

Some like to restuff, some others don’t, and for some it depends on the set they’re working on.  In fact, Kirk started a whole thread about the subject a short time back:

http://www.philcoradio.com/phorum/showth...?tid=12943