[sdiy] Slide pot cleaning

[Adam (synthDIY)]

Dontcha just love vintage synths??!!!

They tell me it's the same for vintage cars, vintage motorbikes, vintage boats...

A

> On 8 May 2026, at 19:38, Richie Burnett <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> Thanks for all the tips guys.  I equipped myself with IPA, DeoxIT F5, cotton buds, acid-free silicon grease and a solder sucker and spent the best part of two days de-soldering, opening, cleaning, re-greasing and re-soldering all of the slide pots on my SH-09.  It wasn't much fun, and was a lot more time-consuming than I had imagined!  On the plus side all of the slide pots now work perfectly with no crackling or jumping.
> 
> I also bought some "2mm adhesive craft foam sheet" from UK Hobbycraft and cut slits in this to make new dust covers for the groups of sliders.  This seemed preferable to felt that might shed lint into the sliders over time. I guess there's a chance that this new foam dust-guard might eventually dry up and disintegrate into tiny brittle pieces like the old one did, but if I can get another 40 years out of it that will see me out! :-)
> 
> I'm particularly grateful for Adam's warning that the resonance slide pot is fitted upside down relative to all of the other pots on the control panel! This would have caught me out for sure had I not been pre-warned and marked the end of each slider that was closest to the keys before removing them one by one.  My only tip to anyone contemplating doing similar to clean out sliders on their own vintage synth would be to exercise caution when using the pliers to fold back the little steel tabs on the bottom of the potentiometer's case (shown in Adam's article):
> 
> https://mezzoauto.blogspot.com/2017/05/roland-sh-09-slide-pot-rehab.html
> 
> I got a bit over-confident after doing the first dozen pots, and then managed to slightly pinch or somehow distort the shape of the rectangular steel enclosure on one of the slide pots.  This made the slide action have a lot more physical resistance at one point along it's travel.  Of course I didn't notice until I'd soldered it back in, so had to remove it and sort that out.  It's quite easy to bend the case and even the tiniest bit alters the feel of the slider action.
> 
> -Richie,
> 
> 
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