In article ,
"COLIN LAMB" wrote:

Warning, do not do this
without thought first, or you will make things irreversibly worse and we
will see it on eBay.

Colin-

"I cut it off twice and it's still too short!"

Thanks for your thoughts. It is difficult to see whether the bent plate
has sections or not. The possibility of damage is the main reason I
haven't already tried straightening it to see if there was any
improvement.

This VFO works backwards. Zero on the dial is the high frequency end,
and 250 is the low frequency end. I've gone through the alignment
procedure so everything is right at the dial edges. Unfortunately the
WARC bands occupy the central portion of the dial, so it would be easy
to transmit outside the low end of each band.

There is an article in an ARRL QRP handbook, that mentions the HW-9
having poor dial accuracy. I'm at the point where I'll probably go
ahead and carefully straighten the capacitor plate to see if it makes an
improvement. If not, I'll then take the approach you suggested to
re-bend the plate.

73,
Fred
K4DII