These notes from John M at arrowtank dot com:

In the Mid 60's, I was on a destroyer tender (Everglades AD24) as an ET.
I remember working on the SRR series receivers.

The main problem we found with them were tube noise, and alignment.  
The book called for about 40 hours to overhaul and align one.   

Three things I came up with that greatly reduced our time on each radio were:

   1.  Ground the grid pin on each stage sequentially, from the audio on back.
       Noisy tubes would show up in the headphones.  Microphonics, also.  

   2.  I taught those under me how to solder the tubes in without destroying 
       them.  I think most of the tube noise was from gasiness caused by 
       overheating the leads on soldering.   We used small irons, and heat 
       sink techniques more apropro to transistors. We also took great 
       care to clean up the pins and install the new tube without stressing 
       the wires too much, leaving a slight bow in them so the soldering 
       heat wouldn't pull on them. We also acquired a Pace desoldering 
       system to quickly and cleanly remove the old tubes.  

   3.  We spot soldered a jumper on the BFO switch so we could align the 
       local oscillator to a zero beat instead of a peak meter reading as 
       the manual called out.  That took the RF alignment out of the 
       equation, and allowed the alignment of the oscillator  in a couple 
       of passes, instead of about 15.  2 more passes on the RF stages, 
       precision alignment of the IF's and we typically shipped a radio 
       with 6uv sensitivity.  

As I remember, BUSHIPS rejected the proposed procedure change because the 
spot soldered wire was an unauthorized modification.  (The switch is too 
cluttered to use aligator clips.  Maybe modern test hooks would work.)  We 
did it anyway, bid 30 hours on a receiver, did them in 10, hit the beach 
early every day, and took fleet awards for efficiency.  

Ahhhh, the memories.

jm (the network guy)

In a subsequent e-mail, John says that it was probably the calibrate
switch vice the BFO.  Additional steps were (apply many years
of haze here):

1.  calibrate the sig gen (with frequency counter) and align the IF's
2.  Set the BFO to 0 (probably IF freq) using a frequency counter.
3.  Jumper the switch so that you could beat that frequency to the 
    actual incoming RF signal stream.
4.  Using headphones, or better yet, a meter on the detector to discern 
    zero beat, align the local oscillator, top and bottom on each band.
5.  Using the peak meter setup in the manual, now align the RF's.  Do not 
    touch the local oscillator adjustments.  (The manual had you adjust 
    them all to peak meter.)
6.  Remove the jumper.

Walla, perfect alignment every time.  

I also gave you a procedure to ground the grids and listen for noise from 
audio back to rf's to remove gassy and microphonic tubes.   Results were 
always better than spec.

This is all from memory, 35 years later.  If you could set me up with 
schematics, and a working receiver to play with, I could detail this 
for you.  :-)

jm (the network guy)

Anyone have a receiver and schematic to loan John for fully 
recovering these techniques?