[turretslug]

Yes, there's a little bit of rust and general air of neglect, but nothing too serious and I suspect that many radios of this age (and weight!) will have spent some of their time in a corner of a shed or garage. It certainly looks as though it will smarten up nicely and it looks to be in largely original condition with no grim carving-about.

It looks as if the 1st RF stage valve/toob (6SG7) has been replaced with a 717A type- this is essentially a 6AK5 on an octal base with a a distinctive "mushroom" envelope. These were available in large numbers as surplus post-war and part of the appeal was that they could be plugged straight in with no socket rewiring. There was a craze for "hot-rodding" older sets in the 'sixties as transistors started to dominate and owners of valved sets developed paranoia that they might not be hearing that last faintest 10m potential contact, and lots of lore developed that fitting XXX wonder-bottle would bring in icicles cracking on Pluto. The 717A has a small anode area and was intended to be operated at low power, so beware that the AR88's circuit design doesn't over-stretch it. Also, it's a "straight", rather than variable-mu valve, so ideally its AGC ought to be potted-down on the AGC diode's load resistor. It may simply have had the AGC disconnected and been wired for high gain.

Good luck, these are still marvellous sets when aligned and operating well.