Cleaning Knobs on Vintage Audio Equipment

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Larin Parker with Expert Village! We're looking at potentiometers commonly known as knobs on your audio equipment. One of the most common problems on older equipment is as you turn these guys they're going to make kind of crackling sounds, and the reason is because there is a mechanical part in here and really mechanical items tend to fail before electrical stuff does. Inside of here there?s a little wiper and you can see that there?s a little bit of movement underneath here but there?s a little opening right beneath my fingernail there underneath the contacts where its soldered and that?s usually where the dirt comes in and then that?s usually where you deal with it. If you really want to get these guys clean, you can take them out of the assembly and then use some of that deoxit spray, the contact cleaner spray, and you just give it a good spray right underneath there, you can also go in right at the shaft right there and then just turn it back and forth to just kind of lubricate and agitate it. If that doesn't work probably the next step in cleaning is you can try an ultrasonic cleaner, sometimes it works real well, while sometimes it can degrade the potentiometer depending on how old it is though so be careful with that. Thirdly you can always replace these. If you're comfortable with your soldering skills you can always take it out, read the back, see how many k or how many megs it is. This says two megs, you go to your local electronic supply and you can go up to the desk and say help, I need a two meg potentiometer this size. Bring it the one that had gone bad and they'll hook you up with a new one and you can swap it in there. Just remember to take a picture of what the potentiometer looked like before you remove it from your piece of equipment so you know how to put it back and what wires are connected to it. That's how to deal with these guys and they do get dirty quite easily and it's a very common problem, but it's easy to deal with as long as we know what we're doing."