Giving Vintage Synths New Life In A Potentiometer Cleaning Showdown

As anyone who has ever owned a piece of older equipment that has a potentiometer in it can attest to, these mechanical components do need their regular cleaning ritual. Whether it’s volume knobs on a receiver or faders on a mixer, over time they get crackly, scratchy and generally imprecise due to the oxidation and gunk that tends to gather inside them.

This is your potentiometer caked with gunk.

In this blast from the past, [Keith Murray] shows a few ways in which fader-style potentiometers can be cleaned, and how well each cleaning method works by testing the smoothness of the transition over time with an oscilloscope. It’s enlightening to see just how terrible the performance of a grimed-up fader is, and how little a blast of compressed air helped. Contact cleaner works much better, but it’s essential to get all of the loosened bits of gunk out of the fader regardless.

In the end, a soak in isopropyl alcohol (IPA), as well as a full disassembly followed by manual cleaning were the only ones to get the fader performance back to that of a new one. Using contact cleaner followed by blasting the fader out with compressed air seems to be an acceptable trade-off to avoid disassembly, however.

What is your preferred way to clean potentiometers to keep that vintage (audio) gear in peak condition? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks, [Grant Freese], for the tip!