Having gone back up the thread, you are quite right. I should have looked at the picture.
What you have said about the switch cleaner should work, after all, I did put a digital camera in an ultrasonic bath, with a drop of Fairy and a lot of water, some time ago and it came out working after a week of drying out :-)
Dave
Don't worry about it. I was quite tired and probably quite full of whisky when I wrote that. I had, bad day then.
Dave
I'd be a little cautious of using switch cleaner on a potemtiometer. If it's a carbon one it may lift the carbon track. If plastic the cleaner residue will attract dirt which will increase wear and/or cause noise. This is always assuming that this control is a pot and not a rotary encoder. Does it go round and round and round or does it have stops?
Most switches are self cleaning, the decent bit of excercise that he has just given it may well be all that is required. I'd reassemble and test checking for free movement of the knob before spashing solvents and lubricants about.
Round and round and round. So are we talking "rotary encoder" then? (there's nothing wrong with the rotary - volume - function, just the 'push' bit.)
Bugger. Just ordered the cleaner from ebay, to use *before* reassembly on the basis that I didn't want to have to go through the laborious process twice...
Do you have to fully reassemble or can you have bits hanging on their wires just to test?
Just a follow-up to say that rightly or wrongly I took the switch cleaner option, and the radio is now working fine again. Whether it was down to the cleaner or just the old 'take-it-apart-and-reassemble-it-to-scare-it-into-submission' routine which did the trick I can't say.
Though personally I think the original problem was caused by the two extra screws I had left over following reassembly...
Thanks for all the advice David
Another trick when dealing with contacts is to use a pencil eraser on the contact points and wiper, this works on gold plated tracks a treat. What happens is the track gets polluted by the atmosphere it is in and effectively goes open circuit. A pencil eraser wipes this off.
Contrary to what has been said about switch cleaner, it does not leave a residue, so I would think that is has worked for this knob/switch.
As far as the 2 screws left over after the repair, I wouldn't worry about them. Many years ago I used to decoke my Hilman Minx at regular intervals and every time I had spare nuts, bolts and washers left over. It never lost any oil and was still going strong when I had to scrap it off due to body rust.
Dave
Have to say it looks and smells uncommonly like WD40... presumably not the same though?!
David
It's *mandatory* to have a couple of screws left over after you've serviced anything electronic. Just think of the fuel you'll save by not having to tote around those unnecessary bits...
:-)
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