Alright guys! The Fada 1001 arrived and restoration is underway. It was dead on arrival (contrary to the seller saying it gives static) but I managed to resuscitate the patient. Here is the progress so far:
Upon opening the unit, a cascade of mouse feces and old Hershey's Kisses foil and their paper pulls poured out. I guess the mice made a home in there and stole the owner's candies. I also saw chew marks on the loop antenna board. But interestingly, the unit was entirely pristine. There were no visible repairs or component changes. The radio is smaller than I expected. It almost looks miniature. You can't tell that from the photo above. That makes it cute for me.
Installed a new polarized line cord with neutral to the chassis. This is not a floating-ground radio.
Replaced the burnt out bulb with an led bulb.
Replaced the filter caps and their wires. All three of them tested open with zero capacitance.
Did some resistance measurements and decided to try bringing it up on the isolation transformer/variac/dim bulb tester. Amazingly, nothing exploded and there was no smoke. After ramping up to full voltage, the radio started talking to me. Like Sleeping Beauty awakening after a kiss. But it was after midnight and Daddy made me stop for the day.
Next day.
Lubed the tuning condenser and dial parts because they were stiff. Used Daddy's gun oil, ha ha ha.
Cleaned the volume potentiometer because it was scratchy. It's quiet now.
Replaced the line cap with an X2 safety capacitor. It reduced interference a bit too.
Noticed pops and crackles on the audio. At first, I thought it could be silver mica disease, but no, because these IF transformers don't have silver mica caps. Finally found it was due to very corroded tube socket pins on the rectifier tube. Carefully cleaned them up and squeezed them a little with the pliers to make them tighter. Also cleaned the pins on the rectifier tube itself. No more pops and crackles. The other tubes looked fine so I didn't mess with them.
Noticed that most of the time the speaker seemed fine but sometimes it rattled and whacking it stopped the rattle. So obviously there was debris in there. I had to remove the felt cover over the voice coil and clean debris out of the voice coil-magnet gap. No more rattling.
Did a preliminary alignment.
So now little Fada is doing great electrically-wise. I'm still going to re-cap the paper-wax capacitors and add the dropping resistor to bring the 127Vac line down to 117Vac.
The enclosure is in pretty good shape. When I get my energy back, I'll post some pictures for you.
As a little history, the Fada 1001 is a sister to the famous Fada 1000 "bullet" radios, which are considered highly collectible and valuable. It's sort of the last hurrah for wooden radios.
https://antiqueradio.org/fada1000.htm
You can see them together in this old ad:
Stay tuned for the cabinet restoration...