On Fri, 05 May 2006 00:24:51 +0200, lcdpublishing <lcdpublishing@...> wrote:
The only thing I can think of is something I remember my father
doing years ago on a television set with a mechanical tuner. When
it wouldn't tune a channel, he would spray contact cleaner on the
tuner and life was good again. I am wondering if it is possible
that some of the quirks of this thing could be caused by dirty
contacts and such?
I don't have contact cleaner on hand, and I don't know enough about
this thing to start squirting chemicals in it to see if it helps or
not.
DON'T just put anything in there unless you KNOW it WILL do some good, because most likely otherwise it WILL do some DAMAGE.
Many contact cleaners are supposed to be removed again after application, so if you just spray it in there into places you will never be able to get access to without having to take the whole thing completely apart - which probably leaves you with a few boxes of spare components - you are gonna be in trouble.
Some of these circuits can be high impedance, so any leakage is BAD. I have been there, done that, with fluke multimeters. I thought it would be clever to spray some contact cleaner into the switch matrix that was acting up. Well, the whole thing leaked like a sieve after that (if that comparision is appropriate electrically), you guess how good that is with high impedance precision meter circuits. I ended up having to wash the thing several times with really hot water and detergents, and then alcohol, then bake dry it, to get things somewhat similar to normal again.
So if there is a bad pot or switch, get right in there to get it out or at least somehow separate it from the rest to service it. Because if you just spray in stuff from afar you are likely to have to take it all apart anyway and work on much more than only the faulty component.
If it is a bad contact you can identify it by wiggling at the attached knob, usually.
It is hard to say what exactly is wrong or right with the thing from afar, but doing some of the test procedures from the manual couldn't hurt?
ST
