Try to hide your astonishment.
I posted last week about trying to get a Colpitt's oscilator working at 10 MHz, and several people generously offered insight and advice. I tried to respond that I was grateful, but had been staring at the damn thing for so long I was no longer able to see it, and was setting it aside for a couple days. That post unfortunately got lost in the ether. This weekend I went back to the oscillator, and immediately saw that I had the transistor in backwards (swapped E/C leads). Fixed that, and it fired right up. Used it to provide an input I could scope to the RF amplifier I built to assist my shortwave radio, and found that the coupling capacitor I put in to keep DC out of the tuning circuit was blown. Replaced that, and *it* started working.
Bedamned. Now I just need to get a 5 MHz crystal so I can check *both* frequency ranges, and rewind the toroids to get some overlap.
Thank you to those who offered encouragement and input. It helped me realize that I had become cross-eyed, and needed to do someting else for a while.
Dave