Hi all,
Well I was never in the trade so my experiences are more from my Hobby.
I did however I did work for a few years as a Technician at the College where I had studied the 2240. We had lots of G11s to teach with and although they were really good (once you had replaced the tube busting smoothing cap), these poor old sets suffered from years of having the same components replaced again and again, so it was not so easy to keep them going. I had fun making them go wrong though, filing the underside of resistors or painting different bands on, blowing up transistors and diodes with mains charged electrolytics etc.
In my hobby, well my third set was a TV22 with a dead lopty which for a 16 year old seemd a bit daunting.
The last set I restored was a nightmare. It was an HMV905 with all the TV bits missing. After all the hard work, the low bandwith of these sets leaves one with a rather uninspiring picture. The depth of the chassis and the component density can't have made them popular with engineers either. The pre-war 7" Ekco sets give much beter results. Still it is a really nice bit of furniture and a decent radio.
I'm currently restoring two nasty basket cases which are very slow projects. One is the Baird Garrick with the nasty EHT rectifier bracket that wants to kill me (see photo). And the other is a unique pre-war Electrostatic survivior that has had two of its chassis stripped and re-cad plated. There is no circuit info for this set and it is only 90% complete. Mind you it has a good tube though (Ediswan 12H), so I suppose we will get there in the end.
Oh, I forgot the Spencer-West 957. It has a non-isolated chassis inside an earthed metal case. I've included a picture showing how the reverse mounted speaker sits on the back acting as the CRT neck protector
Spencer-West described it as an ideal second set
Cheers
Andy