I'm not real happy with the speaker grill, and I may have made it worse, so I'm not posting that until I know for sure. I'll write up a detailed article with everything I did, how, and why. Of course there will be lots of pics.
For now, I've removed the death cap, added a temporary 3-prong plug (I have a longer one on the way with proper strain reliefs), removed the aux AC outlet from the circuit, removed and de-rusted literally every piece of metal I could get to outside of the chassis including the nuts on the input jacks and the individual screws on the amp corners, cleaned the knobs, de-oxed the pots, scrubbed tolex until I can't feel my shoulder, glued loose bits, cleaned all the nasty dust off of the tubes, and added new weather-stripping between the chassis and the front panel.
After a half-bottle of phosphoric acid goo over six applications did almost nothing to the chassis rust, I took a rotary metal brush to it. The chassis is a disaster. The rust was 1/8" thick in spots, but it's only on the top. Honestly, the only right way to solve that was to take everything out and sandblast the chassis, but I was unwilling to put in that much effort since this has burned a lot of time already and point-to-point wiring kind of freaks me out when thinking about a full disassembly. I gave up on the idea of trying to restore the chassis and settled for trying to stop any more rust.
It's time for a post-amp-overhaul-cocktail. :very_drunk: