Short on power rail for Maplin MN3011 BBD Delay Kit

[BluffChill]

I bought a 'half-finished' kit from eBay a couple of years ago and just got round to finishing it. The seller said it just needed the DC socket soldering in and fixing and it would work. Guess what? It didn't.

It takes a 14-16V DC single supply so I used two 9v batteries with a voltage divider to get 15V. Nothing. I checked for a short between power and ground and I've got about 9.2K resistance from the V+ rail to the ground. As a result when I hook up the batteries, I only get 1.5V DC across the rails. I've checked the soldering and it seems to be fine. From the schematic, can anyone see anything obvious that I might have missed? (Sorry for the huge picture!)

[anotherjim]

Don't use the voltage divider.
The circuit resistance you measured is only a rough guide since the chips won't be biased into normal operation, but 9k or so is a reasonable indication that there are no simple short circuits on the power rail. It's more likely your supply voltage isn't holding up.
Just use a 1k resistor in series with the supply first. Measure the total battery voltage before that - is it about 18V? If no then your batteries are no good. To drop 18v to 15v, it might be better to use 2 red LED's in series to lose about 3v. The 20mA max of the LED's should be plenty - and act as fuses if it's more than that!