Contact enhancer recommendation

[Mark Hammer]

I had been wanting to mention this for a while but never had the right spelling.  A buddy with a very active studio and lotsa pots to keep happy recommends this stuff to me very highly: http://www.stabilant.com/techt02h.htm

Apparently they sell it now a couple of blocks from my home so I'm looking to get some some.  Maybe just the sort of thing you want for high duty pots like wahs.

[Mark Hammer]

I was expecting the stuff to be very expensive, based on my buddy's recommendation.  When I dropped into the local industrial electonics distributor the other day I was pleasantly surprised to find it was only 50 cents for a small (half millilitre) container.  That may well be a price unique to this distributor (though I can't imagine 0.5ml containers being priced dramatically differently elsewhere), and I suppose this is sort of in the realm of perfume or truffle pricing when you start talking in terms of 4oz or something, but it comes with a small plastic applicator that lets you stick just the tiniest (sesame-seed size) dab of it inside a pot, so even a half ml goes a long way.  Supposedly, its the sort of thing you apply once during the lifetime of the pot, without ever having to redo.  Maybe just the sort of thing that would-be boutique pedalmakers might like to include as an advertised feature in their products.  Wouldn't you like to know that you'd NEVER have to spray contact cleaner inside the pots of a cherished pedal and risk getting spray all over the board or chassis?

BTW, I have absolutely no commercial affiliation with these people.  I was simply impressed with how easy and inexpensive it was to move from the world of cheap messy spray cans of Radio Shack contact cleaner to the world of high-end contact enhancement.  Seems to me that if a pedal is going to spend its life on dirty stages under the feet of people, that anything which permits an expensive pot to continue behaving like it's an expensive pot is a good thing.  We make a big to-do abut true bypass, jack quality, op-amps, and blue LEDs.  Why not make a stink about what are likely the most electronically fragile aspects of the pedal: the pots and switches?

[Paul Marossy]

Just don't use any of that stuff on the preamp module sockets in the Seymour Duncan Convertible - it can actually cause B+ to be shorted to ground and burn a hole thru the PCB! 

(that's straight from Keven Beller, chief engineer at Seymour Duncan - one of the designers of the amp)

An FYI just in case anyone here owns one of these amps. 

[gaussmarkov]

Seems to me that if a pedal is going to spend its life on dirty stages under the feet of people, that anything which permits an expensive pot to continue behaving like it's an expensive pot is a good thing.

i'm digging it.  thanks, mark!