Hello,
Been a while since i had a good chance to get back looking at this. I made up an outdoor aerial, 20m of wire running N-S with ground rod hooked upto some coax to run into my garrage.
I also got the contact cleaner out and polished up the wafers using a sheet of paper to rub the contact faces without getting too invasive.
Another tweak, as well as changing out some of the DC bulk smoothing caps, i also wired an external DC supply to the rectifier output so I can run off a 12V battery or my bench supply which are much quieter.
Massive difference on band 5, others are still not great but i think the wafers need more attention as sometimes i need to click back and forward when changing bands to get a sound from the speaker.
I've attached a list of what i picked up on band 5 but I need to work through the others in more detail. I found webSDRs very useful as a reference for frequency and working out what i was listening too.
Interestingly, as 4 and 5 have an overlap at the bottom and top end, i had thought i should get high end 5 at low end 4, but that was not the case.
If I need to do an alignment (after I've done more work on the wafers) I hope a former colleague may have this kit, else I seen the likes of
https://www.vintagetvandwireless.com/radio-restoration as perhaps an option if i was stuck. Other options are likely available!