[Granitehill]

I had one of these, bought new (serial #557). I agree completely about the flimsy build quality.
Mine was OK on receive but a bit deaf. This turned out to be a poor (but not dead) MC1496 receive mixer. It's about the last thing I checked - after chasing my tail for months, A new mixer brought it up by about 10-12dB. It was still a bit below spec on 10, but usable (0.5uV for 10dB S+N/N, handbook figure of 0.35uV).

I had low output also, following a replacement of both MRF476 PA transistors which cooked themselves one night (no idea why). I set it up to the standing current recommendations in the handbook (10mA). That turned out to be flat wrong. I couldn't get anything like a decent output. Eventually I discovered that the correct figure should have been 30-40 mA. Adjusted PA bias to 35mA and full output restored.
The moral to that tale is - beware of TenTec handbooks. There's quite a lot of mistakes, and I've been bitten by this more than once since then.

There's a build problem which hits most of these - VFO instability. I was getting quite large frequency jumps and warble - apparently mechanical rather than electronic in source. This turned out - eventually - to be lots of poor grounding paths caused by the use of small pop rivets to join chassis components together, rather than good honest nuts and bolts. The rivets didn't give a good low resistance connection in the first place, and a few years of surface oxidation just finished the job off.
The fix : Drill these rivets out and bolt the joint up good and solid. (I wrote this up in detail in SPRAT 98 (spring 1999)).
I'll bet at least some of your problems are caused by this chassis grounding thing. I didn't have any problems with dry joints, though.

All in all, I was a bit disappointed by the Argonaut. My faith in Ten Tec was restored when I replaced it by a Corsair 2, which is a magnificent machine . Very different price range and market though, to be fair.