Cleaning the Dyna Input Jacks

Things are starting to turn from the destruction mode to the reassembly mode on the Dynaco PAS rebuild.  Soon ve shall hear the fine tube tone once again!

I keep a handful of old toothbrushes on the workbench for cleaning parts.  A lot of the radios I work on have 50, 60, 70 years of grime on them so the toothbrushes usually wind up being used the clean radio chassis.  For that kind of cleaning I usually use Simple Green at full strength.  That stuff really rocks - you can mix it to different strength and it's biodegradable.  At full strength, it's a good cleaner, not super potent, which is perfect for my use.  It also doesn't have a chemical smell, which is nice.

I did a run of Simple Green on the input jacks, then I used Deoxit.  That's what I'm scrubbing with in the first picture.  After the Deoxit, I took after the jacks with Noxon 7.  This is a metal polish similar to Brasso, but I like it better.  There has been a lot of discussion on the Antique Radio Forms (see my links) about Brasso and how the formula has apparently changed for the worse.  Maybe that's why I favor Noxon.  Not sure where I even got the stuff...I need to get more.

For the Noxon treatment, I used Q-tips and brother, was it a pain.  I don't have any polishing pads for my Dremel, otherwise I would have tried that.  I didn't get the contacts totally clean, but they are like 85% better than they were.

After I did the outside (actually the ground connection) on the RCA jacks, I doused a Q-tip with Deoxit and used it to clean the inside connector (the hot side).  I wound up tearing off some of the cotton on the end of the Q-tip so I could jam it in the connector as you see.

It also took more than one Q-tip to do this, but they came out dirty each time, so that's a good thing.

After that, I sprayed a bit more Deoxit into the connector and insert a phono plug into each one and turned it a bit.  I'm pretty confident the connectors are cleaned up well.  Since all of our signal goes through them, we need to ensure they are clean, yes?

The contacts are pretty shiny now.

I also took some of the Mother's aluminum polish to the back panel.  It was much dirtier than the inside (no surprise there...).  It looks better, but it's not perfect.  I got worn out and didn't want to spend another 2 hours going at it.

The connectors look like little smokestacks, don't they?

Now we (finally) get to start Putting Stuff Into The Chassis.

I take out my trusty 1/4 inch Craftsman socket and have at bolting the new PC boards into place.  They go under the chassis, not over it.

Here we have the new boards in place.

I have a handful of components - coupling caps - to replace on both boards but I decided to wait until the chassis is mostly wired up to put them in.  It will become clearer later why I'm waiting.