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Fazio Electric

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floobydust:
I didn't hear reasoning or experience or science for condemning DeoxIT. Caig Laboratories has gone way overboard with their marketing, confusion, redundant products etc. It's gross trying to pick one of their products. I hate it. They dumb it down and make a product for every application and component imaginable in order to sell more more more.

There must be a dozen threads on EEVblog about servicing potentiometers and rotary switches. Everything from WD-40 fanboys to worse. It starts a Holy War everytime.

There are cleaners, which are solvents to flush out dirt and old lube.
There are contact enhancers, which are PPE and anti-oxidizers.
There are lubricants, which are grease or oil. Silicone or petroleum based. Some have teflon particles added.
If people could understand the three essentials- and that no products do it all. We're just lazy and want to use a spray. Some ingredients are bad with certain materials. I review the MSDS for chemical composition and use that to figure it out.

I found DeoxIT Fader Lube F5 is good at the contact surface, but it's not a lubricant. The shaft is not looked after, likely wear fast now and feel dry. I sprayed some F5 on a paper towel and mirror only to find all except the PPE had evaporated in one day. I would say it's useless as a mech lubricant, and only recently they announced DeoxIT greases like FaderGrease (silicone) but all others use lithium and not suitable for your multimeter rotary switch IMHO. That's where you need both a lube and contact enhancement.
In the old days I was in there with grease on pot's mech, you had to do that after the clean and contact enhance.
Taking apart potentiometers to clean them is just hard due to the crimps and vintage gear i.e. 1950's too fragile sometimes for it.

bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: rsjsouza on December 26, 2021, 08:53:19 pm ---Ah, the term "shotgun" (espingarda) alludes to the very wide blast area of a shot that comes from a shotgun and is usually used when someone in repair goes and replaces all parts regardless of their current state. As you can imagine, this is very common with capacitors.

I, for one, always try to avoid doing this whenever faced with an equipment repair. Obviously that, depending on the complexity of the repair, importance of equipment or obvious recurring faults, this is the best approach.

--- End quote ---

Ah, OK. Now I understand what you mean by that. Yes, but for those 40+ year old amps, as others pointed out, there's no point in testing capacitors one by one to see if it is worth replacing them. There's almost a consensus among guitar amp repair people that they should all be changed out. Sometimes their clients insist on preserving at least the tone capacitors because they believe that that's where the "mojo" is, but leaky coupling caps and dried-out filter caps all go mercilessly. Their replacements are cheap these days and the presence of the old ones can compromise expensive parts like the output tubes, the rectifier tube, the power transformer or the output transformer. No musician wants that.

Shock:
If the amp is cheap and the owner just wants it fixed and reliable, you're not going to be dismantling pots and stuffing caps. There is a large difference between a quick repair and a vintage accurate restoration.

Fader lube (F100L) is for carbon, the plain red Deoxit (D100L) for oxidized metal, Deoxit Gold (G100L) is for gold.

rsjsouza:

--- Quote from: floobydust on December 27, 2021, 04:01:42 am ---I didn't hear reasoning or experience or science for condemning DeoxIT.
(...)
If people could understand the three essentials- and that no products do it all. We're just lazy and want to use a spray.

--- End quote ---

And these are two of the issues with this whole subject; there is a lot of anecdotal evidence with varying degrees of reporting quality, but marketing does not help as they are trying to oversell. In general, in a repair one might not have the history of the prior "fix", only the final result of the techniques and compare to one's own experiences or knowledge about what the product did in a prior attempt. Internet helps with that, but only to a certain extent as it is hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.

A single product also does not do it all, thus the best technique (again, in my experience) would be to clean the part piece by piece and not as a whole using one or more sprays. Obviously that is not possible in all scenarios. Back in my early days I too had applied WD40 to a variety of inappropriate materials and purposes, allured by the marketing surrounding this product, only to find a worse situation only months later. Although not DeoxIT, I have seen other sprays and products (teflon spray, Singer oil, lithium grease, etc.) applied with varying degrees of results.


--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on December 27, 2021, 05:16:19 am ---Yes, but for those 40+ year old amps, as others pointed out, there's no point in testing capacitors one by one to see if it is worth replacing them. There's almost a consensus among guitar amp repair people that they should all be changed out. Sometimes their clients insist in preserving at least the tone capacitors because they believe that that's where the "mojo" is, but leaky coupling caps and dried-out filter caps all go mercilessly. Their replacements are cheap these days and the presence of the old ones can compromise expensive parts like the output tubes, the rectifier tube, the power transformer or the output transformer. No musician wants that.

--- End quote ---
In my experience, musicians want different things and not necessarily the technically superior solution - it is not uncommon they want to preserve the original appearance as much as possible, despite the fact the parts are enclosed under the chassis. For that particular aspect, preserving the original capacitors as much as possible can save some headaches (and create some, of course). Again, it is always a balance between what is needed and what is wanted (and obviously how much $$$ one wants to spend)


--- Quote from: Shock on December 27, 2021, 07:40:11 am ---If the amp is cheap and the owner just wants it fixed and reliable, you're not going to be dismantling pots and stuffing caps. There is a large difference between a quick repair and a vintage accurate restoration.

Fader lube (F100L) is for carbon, the plain red Deoxit (D100L) for oxidized metal, Deoxit Gold (G100L) is for gold.

--- End quote ---
Fully agree; however, the reliable part is what is always on the table when lubricants for pots are discussed. floobydust's post encompasses well what a potentiometer requires overall and your three options are good for the track, not for the shaft.

Shock:
I wasn't replying to Floobs post, just mentioning what Deoxit product is for which contact type. If you have dry lubricant on the shaft as long as it's not super contaminated or damaged there are a few ways to free it up (without opening). As I said, the customers budget often dictates these things.

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