Put it back together and spent 3 hours watching it this morning, so it seems to be working for good, for now. Two things it still needs are a speaker (I have one hanging by one screw in there but I don't have one that's the right size to fit properly), and the ever-missing back. Usually, I only find table sets missing their backs, but these Admirals seem to be an exception. Here's a pic of it sitting next to some other sets.
As far as I understand the retrace blanking, you need the pluses doing the blanking pointing positive to connect to the CRT cathode, or negative to go to the g1. The other way and you wind up actually amplifying the retrace lines rather than cutting of the CRT during retrace. Also the lower the capacitance of the capacitor, the narrower the pulse. And you need the capacitor to keep the dc out, so you're only affecting the CRT when those pulses appear during the retrace. I read this article about it over on the etf website:
http://www.earlytelevision.org/vertical_blaniking.html Everything else I've done was just by trial and error.
I also added retrace blanking to this Airline, making the connection to the CRT g1:
http://www.videokarma.org/showpost.p...2&postcount=15 But with this electrostatic set it was easy, because the signal going to one vertical deflection plate was the upsidedown version of the other, so you can have it either way.