Hi Chris,
i'm not one of the guys here who has technical knowledge; but those pictures are very impressive, thanks for sharing them. a battery powered repro unit makes perfect sense to me, i use a darTZeel battery powered preamp/phono and enjoy the refinement and low noise batteries bring. that is the same battery type that darTZeel (the NHB-18NS uses 4 of those) uses.
how would you describe the performance of this unit? from your description of it's design it should sound wonderful.
i've never seen switches that look like a combination lock before. is that a commercial product or something you built?
mikel