Hallicrafters ST-83

Picked this up in December 2007. I had one of these as a teenager and loved the smooth tuning on it. So again I'm reliving my youth. The one I had as a youth had a yellow front panel as well. However, any pictures you see of an ST-83 all have a dark front panel. I spoke to my uncle who worked at Hallicrafters and he said the yellow panel radios were very early, some even pilot model, radios. Below are some original pictures when I received it.
     
This is how I got it. Front panel was in good shape and underside was in pretty good shape. But the top was a disaster. Rusted real bad. It was going to be a lot of work to clean that up and I didn't really even know if I could completely clean up. It came out pretty good though in the end. 
     
I did strip it down to a bare chassis. Here it is almost all the way dis-assembled. I did remove everything. Here's some pics of re-assembly. Looking pretty good. I replaced all the wafer tube sockets with porcelain sockets. I did also strip down and rebuild the RF section as well. 
     
Here it is about finished. Had to wire brush the chassis to get the rust off. You can still see the area that was very rusted, but it looks pretty good. I repainted the transformers and put new tube shields on. Replaced all the resistors and caps. It's ready for alignment and operation check.
     
Here it is finished. Front panel on. It aligned up very well. RF section is a little touchy during alignment because it did require spreading and compressing one of the coils in the RF as part of the alignment. But patience won out. It works very well. Now all I need is an amp to go with it. 

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