A big Kermit T. Frog YYYAAAYYY!!! If you want to squeeze another 3dB (1/2 S unit) out of it and make your electric meter spin faster there are plenty of balun projects to be found. BTW I found the ex WERA transmitters pretty much destroyed by clods who are clueless that they could have been re-tuned to 160M without butchery. Like Scotty said about his overloaded warp engines, "Me bairns! Me poor, poor bairns!" That's Scottish for babies.

What did you do to the Dentron trying to get the T Bolt to tune up on 160? That can never cut the muster until you pad down the plate and load caps in the amp, then if your signal spitter is up to it things may work for you, sort of. A dipole type antenna will only have a low vertical takeoff angle for good DX when it's up at least 1/2 wave, but you'll only find out what you have until you taste it and see. (Only an expression, RF burns like hell.)

The only caps I know of that lower in value as they age are old electrolytics, they crap out when they dry out. You have to be careful when using single caps to pass RF current, it's not too high in the plate circuit where impedance is high, but it gets touchy in the load where impedance is low and several amperes may be encountered. Phil K2PG found that out the hard way when his Collins 20V 1KW B'cast XMTR tripped out, I found bits of exploded doorknobs in the bottom of the ATU cabinet near the base of his tower used as a grounded vertical folded monopole, an antenna used in AM broadcasting shorter than a series fed tower thus saving expensive steel. I fixed that problem when I found 3 doorknobs totaling the one that exploded, each shared 1/3 of the current. He's a broadcast engineer who goes by the book, I'm a ham who went with what works. Went past tense, now where I can't set up a station I'm a papaer ham, but can still help a little, not much, a little.

I don't know who fed you misinformation, those doorknobs CAN BE USED as padders, but their original purpose when Johnson cheaped out on everything was high voltage filter caps in early B&W televisions. Notice the value is in micromicrofarads rather than today's picofarads. From around 1960 (?) onward picture tubes themselves became HV filter caps, not much capacitance was needed to smooth the 15KHz pulsing DC from the half wave HV rectifier. Yeah, at one point I was a TV repairman struggling along when the partnership broke up and I closed the doors on today's throwaway society.

Well, this looks like the end of my Johnson adventure, have fun with it, but in closing let me remind you of something out of The Care And Feeding Of Power Tetrodes by Eitel McCulloch aka Eimac. Those anodes are supposed to glow cherry red to bright orange under normal operation. The dull coating is the getter, a chemical that "gets" vestiges of gas out of the tubes. If they don't glow eventually they'll get gassy and crap out. Good luck friend and happy hamming to ya!