Hey Morph,

Chugging along are you. Great!

Bypassing is easy on the board. Using a preamp will be needed to eliminate the pot. No resister is necessary and really unwanted. This will only degrade the signal a bit by adding some resistors that might not be exact match values and heat some of that good signal away.

Looking at the back of the board from the top between ZKIT1 and SE84 stencils is the holes for mounting the input wires. The three parallel line trace that kicks to the left about a third way down and continues almost to the bottom where the middle of the three end then the remaining two go to the right ending at the pot mounting holes is where two wires can be jumpered from those ending holes to the next set just to the right. The last set is ground and not used being that the center line trace terminated somewhere else for audio ground. That is it.

This will feed the input directly to the 1K grid resistors of the 6N1P input tube.

Alternately to be zen, the + input wires could be directly attached  to the center pot mounting holes and - input wires to the holes on the right of the center ones eliminating the trace route of the board.

John