[Johnson] Newby Valiant Owner questions

[John Lawson]

   Hello List.

   I've owned my share of BA gear since BA was nearly state-of-the-art, and 
I have a couple of racks full of tube stuff now - I've done a good bit of 
tube design, but mostly audio and ultrasonic gear.

   I have a fairly nice Valiant - it's the first Johnson transmitter I've 
owned since that Viking II I got from an Elmer at age 9.  When I got the 
rig it was reasonably clean and had a set of 866s and five 6146s in it. 
So I replaced the rectifiers with the IR plug-in stacks and bought a nice 
set of 6146Ws for it - quasi-mil tubes, should be twice as good, no?

   Okay - first Valiant lesson: 6146s!! Maybe "A"s....

   Subsequently, I went thru all the caps and found a bunch of them in the 
RF power section were either leaky or badly off spec. So I dug up some 
replacements and shotgunned them all, including that little composite 
multi-section device (C42) - with ceramic disc units of about 6KV.

   After replacing the finals with 6146As - I have the problem that running 
thru a BIrd into a dummy load -the rig plate current 'runs away' on any 
band lower than 20M.  (I never tried 10) 40 holds for 30 seconds or so, 80 
starts climbing right away, and 160 just won't resonate at all.  It's hard 
to diagnose this because I don't want to french-fry a bunch of good tubes 
while thrashing about.

   I have neutralized it according to the manual, BTW.

  Before digging in to this further, I thought to ask if this behavior 
seems 'familiar' to anyone - as in "Oh, Yeah - paint C127 dayglo orange 
and re-tighten the left rear bolt on the mod transformer - guaranteed 
fix!"  I asked this question on the AM Radio list, and got some good 
(eye-opening) info concerning the various flavors of 6146 tubes - but I 
still need to get 'er stable - so I can get on 80M AM - woo hoo!

   Any thoughts - help - advice - sneers - groans - would be much 
appreciated!


Thanks!!

John  KB6SCO