Last photo, a blurry shot of the first power up.
A couple of last thoughts.
Concerning the relays. In spite of buying new ones I considered Restorer-John's advice and decided that it the smartest thing that I could do was listen. So I left the 3 blue relays in place undisturbed.
I thought long and hard about deoxiting the pots and switches. And elected to leave them as is. They were all dead quiet before and I decided not to disturb them.
In spite of building up a replacement bridge rectifier out of those ultra fast soft recovery diodes I decided to wait on that. It's best to just do the straight recap and listen before taking another step. The only deviation that I took from a straight re-cap was to add the little Wima 0.1µF film caps to bypass (almost) all of the signal path caps. "Almost" because I got dumb and forgot the caps in the phono section.
After putting the pre back in place and hooking it up I did a no input sound check. If you can call dead silence a sound check. Looking at the volume knob as a clock my normal listening level is around 9:00 to 9:30. And that's pretty loud. Going up to 10:00 is as much as I can stand. So with no input I turned the amp up to above 12:00. With input the police would be here in short order but I wouldn't know it till they kicked in the door 'cause I'd be deaf. In this case
it was as if the amp wasn't turned on.
Dead silence, with every switch and pot cycled.
1st listening test. This just put me straight into the grin zone. Bass is tighter. Everything is tighter. The music just has more life. Piano sounds like it's in my living room. Freaking aewsome! I'm very happy about how this turned out.
That's all for now.
James
edit: I forgot to state earlier: Every single solder connection in the entire amp was re-flowed.
edit 2: I also forgot something else. It probably is overkill but I measured every set of caps and in every case where there is a L&R pair chose pairs as closely matched as possible.