I’ve got an old Deluxe Reverb that’s recently been having senior moments – it stutters and statics at inopportune times, including but not limited to gigs. So I called a renowned local amp repair person to see about dropping it off to be fixed. After a description of the symptoms, he told me I needed….l
….wait for it…..
WD-40. Plain old hardware-store stuff.
He told me to pull the tubes out, spray WD-40 on the pins, re-insert it, pull it out again, wipe off the pins, and continue until no more crud came off the pins. Y’know what? It works! I’ve spent about a zillion dollars on stuff like Deoxit to keep electronics clean, but apparently plain old WD-40 is fine. The amp quieted down immediately and is behaving better all around. I also cleaned the input jacks this way, and that helped, too.
So there’s tech bulletin #whatever…..