If the socket pins really are nasty, there's no point trying any tricks to fix them. You'll just have more phantom problems later on down the road. On mine, I robbed new pins from another socket and installed them one at a time into the old socket. Has an awesome connection now, and no more ghosting pictures.

I have had a fair amount of success with pipe cleaners and DeoxIT in tube sockets. Use needle nose pliers to stuff the pipe cleaner deeply into each individual pin's socket. I like the way you can see the color change as the DeoxIT does it's thing, as that tells me if the socket is just dusty, like when the socket has been vacant, or if it has any kind of contamination in it. If it was just dusty, you see the red DeoxIT with black on it. If it has seen a change to the metal surface, acidity in the air where it was used, a spill that leaked into a socket, whatever, the red disappears, and it goes brown. That's when I know that a socket can be a problem. And this is where I like to use the liquid DeoxIT, as opposed to the spray.

And, yes, if the sockets have suffered significant degradation as opposed to being just plain cruddy, then they have to go. The contact surface will suffer erratic conductivity, regardless of the contact surface pressure, and give you a lot of different symptoms.

You really don't want to have to go deeply into disassembly like this more than you have to. When you turn the set on, you want to enjoy it, not discover another issue every time you power it up.

{Besides, you don't want to just hear Faye yelling at Spike on board the Bebop, you want to SEE it. }

John S.

CAIG sells a very thin, round stainless steel brush that's great for cleaning socket holes. I have used with liquid DeOxit D100L.

Phil Nelson
Phil's Old Radios
http://antiqueradio.org/index.html