Not that a skeleton at the bottom of a chassis has to be a bad thing. I once bought a Collins 30-L1 on eBay that needed work. When I opened it up it also had a dead skeleton lying on the bottom. And I got that thing working and back on the air. But these Day-Fans are 40 years older than that 30-L1. They look well used. Especially the 7.

The first thing that grabbed my attention on the 7 was the beautiful tuning dial. One dial for all 3 tuning condensers. But it was a thing of beauty. An Accuratune Micrometer Control with dual dial coarse and fine controls.

And pot metal gears

The teeth on the small inner gear were stripped. I spent half an hour trying to figure a way to disasssemble the whole thing but it appeared the gears were pressed into the brass shafts which were pressed into the body of the dial. No luck.

When I first opened up the 7 I took some initial state pictures and didn't even realize the main problem. The 3 tuning condensers are tied together to the single dial. They used a fiber\cloth-like band that had disintegrated in a couple of places. You can see the loading spring attached to the band laying on the chassis next to the middle condenser.

I thought about possibly moving the Day-Fan 5 condensers, which were in good shape over to the 7. But the 7 front panel was not in great shape compared to the 5. A lot of the gold lettering was worn off. Ultimately I decided to keep the 7 for spare parts. There's not much that speaks well for a receiver when all you can say is its best feature is it's beautiful label.

So I guess the skeleton meant more than I was thinking it would. Turns out the Day-Fan 5, which is in much better mechanical shape than the 7 has 2 bad RF chokes and both audio transformers opened on all windings. I'm willing to throw some modern RF chokes at it. But the transformers? I'm still not keen on learning to wind my own. I think this Day-Fan goes on the shelf for now and I keep an eye out for a junker down the road.