a little help diagnosing a fender fuzz wah...

[freak scene]

im tinkering with a friends fender fuzz wah (the black version, not the chrome one ive seen pictures of).  im guessing its the transistor, but i wanted to get opinions.  when you turn the fuzz on it only seems "half" on.  not a lot of noise, unless you hit the strings really hard then it farts a little and sputters out. 

is my diagnosis correct?

[Mark Hammer]

Sometimes that's a sign of a cap.  And sometimes it's a sign of a lousy contact somewhere, whether a pot or a jack or wire hanging on by melted insulation or a fracture on the board.

How old is the unit, and how filthy is it?

[freak scene]

its pretty old, but not incredibly filthy (well minus the dead fly i shook out of it).  i checked the solder joints.  some of them were kind of looking brown and bubbly on the back of the board  i re did a couple i thought looked shakey, and that had no effect.  i went through it with my DMM and everything is getting voltage.  but i wasnt sure how to calculate what voltages were supposed to be reading from the base/emitter/collector.  someone mentioned it should be a .07 difference from the base to the emitter which it wasnt it was like .04ish.

[Mark Hammer]

If you shook a dead fly out of it, then clearly the various openings are big enough to let lots of stuff in there. I'm not saying tis is necessarily the root of all audible problems with it, but a decent cleaning of pots and possibly switches might be useful to be able to help tracking down whatever is the source of the problem.

[freak scene]

If you shook a dead fly out of it, then clearly the various openings are big enough to let lots of stuff in there. I'm not saying tis is necessarily the root of all audible problems with it, but a decent cleaning of pots and possibly switches might be useful to be able to help tracking down whatever is the source of the problem.

gotcha.  thanks!