In article ,
Fred McKenzie wrote:

I'll probably go
ahead and carefully straighten the capacitor plate to see if it makes an
improvement.

I now believe the bent plate was an effort to correct another problem.
Talk about a can of worms!

With the plate straightened, it was not possible to calibrate the dial
ends within the range of adjustment of the capacitor's trimmer.

Then I noticed that the capacitor plates had not been lined up with two
"guide holes" on its frame. I did that, and things got worse.

Now I find that frequency peaks at around 50 KHz on the dial.
Apparently it is going out of oscillation, or into some other mode of
oscillation, when it nears the end of rotation.

The capacitor plates are NOT shorting. The inductor's slug is in the
correct (lower) half of the coil. The next step is to verify that the
right capacitors are in the feedback voltage divider.

Another thing I may try is to replace the VFO transistor. The original
is an MPF-105. I have a couple of spares, but perhaps a higher gain
device would be better.

Fred
K4DII