Thanks Cliff. Before seeing your post, I figured out that the whole front comes off - the hard way. I started unscrewing everything front and back, and whole plug-in began to fall apart. It's pretty slick they way they did it. I have often had to take front panels apart, and always dreaded removing everything on the panel in order to pop the front plate just to access the rail screws. The 7L5 assembly is fairly complicated, but it works. I now have the front panel assembly separated, and the special switches removed.
Fortunately, these switches, the rotary encoder, and other items up front survived in good shape, especially considering what must have happened to this poor thing. It appears it was probably in a mainframe that got dropped or hit with a forklift from the back, deforming it such that the plug-in is severely distorted. The depth is off-square by almost a cm side to side. The guts seem to be intact, although all misaligned, and the front panel casting and face are bent, but otherwise not a scratch on it. The only damage up front was a broken small knob and bent shaft on the dot frequency fine tune. The back plate is mangled up, but should be fairly easy to straighten back out.
I'm hoping that I can just strip the front panel and straighten the pieces, straighten the back plate, and replace one or both busted plastic board edge connector supports to get it mechanically square again. The rest should be about realigning the guts and figuring out how to put everything back together. After all this, I can then plug it into a mainframe and see if it even works.
I have to mention again, that I like this pinned assembly method used here. It probably saved this plug-in from nearly certain destruction. If the front was held on the rails with the typical screwed-on method, the casting would have likely snapped and taken out the special switches, and more. With the pins, everything still bent, but the pins pulled loose, allowing some give on the assemblies, without fractures. Actually, there is one other broken item - one of the plastic pins from the front panel snapped, and the end is probably still in the side casting. I'll be able to rig up a simple replacement for the pin.
Ed
