Your brother sounds like a smart man.
When we were young, I was maybe six and he was nine, we were roughhousing (what my grandma called playing grab ass!) and we knocked a 19 inch B&W Admiral off the stand and poof! It was dead. Bill asked my mom, If I can fix it can I keep it in my room?
He took all the tubes out of the back and went to the stationery store in the village that had a tube tester. All the tubes were good. He put them back in the order of the diagram he made.
Plugged it in and voila! We had a TV in our room.