An Unintended Post-Mortem

Many of us wind up in a similar situation, I'm sure: we impulse buy at hamfests—great plans for some big old currently non-working piece of gear—and then later on reality sets in and we realize that we'll never do anything with it.
I had brought home, a few Nearfests back, an old home-brew 4-1000 amp; not an old rusted mouse-motel, but obviously ignored for decades. No power supply, but big, in a home-built enclosure. Also obvious was a catastrophic failure at some point in its life: the B&W plate choke windings were scorched and burnt open. The clear plastic spacer/stiffeners on the B&W 850 switched inductor had disintegrated, too, although the culprit there was time, not a zorch.
The price was right, and I couldn't resist, but it sat, and sat, and sat, inviting conversion to a mouse motel in my own basement. I really didn't need a grounded-grid 4-1000A amp, as such, but I'd thought of reworking it into a screen-modulated transmitter, the air variables having insufficient spacing for plate modulation.
Ultimately, there comes a reckoning—my house and workshop are only so big—so yesterday I dragged it out of its dark corner purgatory, broke out the destruct-o-tools, and parted it out. Lots of great parts in there that hopefully will find a new life someday, while the empty sheet metal husk is in the back of my pickup, bound for the scrap bin at the town dump.
I hadn't intended a post-mortem autopsy, just a brute-force dismemberment, but something caught my eye: it was a grounded-grid amp, but the grid of the 4-1000A wasn't strapped to ground at the socket, but connected by a run of thin-gauge coax to the grid-current metering circuit, and from there, presumably, to ground, or some sort of bias supply (no point in diagramming it all out, since I was parting it out.) Anyway, right there at terminal #3 on the socket—the grid—the coax had come disconnected; just a little blob of cold solder remained. The builder—after all the otherwise good work he'd done—hadn't even made a proper bend-hook-and-solder connection; he'd just quickly tacked the grid wire onto the terminal and done a very poor job of it. The cold solder failed, leaving the grid floating, and I would imagine the plate current soared until the plate choke opened.
Moral of the story, I guess: dismembering old gear can be sad, but educational as well: an otherwise fine build can be laid low by one tiny little cold solder joint.