Ill advised replacement?.

Now in my retirement, I have taken up repairing vintage valve radios as a hobby. I am not technically trained but will 'try my hand' at anything. I have an Ekco A274 which was 'dead', I tracked it down to an open circuit smoothing choke. I had a old wire wound tap[ off resistor from my old stock of bits, one of the tap offs was the same resistance according to the service manual so I fitted it. And the radio now works!. Have I done something very unadvisable or can I 'get away with it'?. 

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You will get more mains hum than the original design engineer intended. If a resistor would have given enough smoothing of the B+ voltage, the designer would surely have chosen to fit a resistor instead of a more expensive choke.  Refer to for example the Philips 521A and 522A radios from the mid 30's , the cheaper 521 A with a small speaker with not so good bass response has just a resistor for smoothing the B+ voltage but the more expensive 522A  with its bigger speaker has a choke for smoothing although the rest of the circuitry is exactly the same in both chassis.

I would say that its ok as an emergency repair if absolutely necessary to get the radio working in a crisis situation, but not as a step in a serious renovation of the radio.

Study the open circuited choke carefully, often the reason for a such fault is just that the wire is broken near a solder lug or at any other place where it is accessible for repair.

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