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Ralph Mowery

In article ,
says...

First recommendation would be "stick to the manufacturer's
rules". They may know something we don't.

I've read a number of comments (Hi, Jeff!) that DeOxIt is *not* a good
thing to use on gold-plated contacts. Gold plating is often somewhat
porous, and the DeOxIt can creep through the pores down to the base
metal and may actually attack it. This can cause the gold plating to
fail.

CAIG makes a different product ("ProGold") which is intended for
gold-plated contacts, and if I understand correctly, it's intended to
avoid this problem.

Your Tek's switch may actually be suffering from contact wear, rather
than contact surface contamination. If I recall properly, the
delicate contact fingers in the switch do "rub" slightly on the
contact pads when the switch is activated, and over time this can wear
away the gold plating, and the contact don't work well after that.
Cleaning (with ispropanol or anything else) isn't going to help this
situation more than very temporarily.

I haven't found a solution (so to speak :-) ) for this sort of
problem, other than an actual repair of the switch (replace the
contact fingers) and as you note, this may not be possible due to lack
of available parts.

Usually it is best to stay with what the manufacturer recommends, but in
this case the Deoxit was probably thought of years after the scope was
made.

Thanks for the advice of the Deoxit Gold. Maybe I will try that at some
point instead of the kind I have.

As stated above I have been repairing some electronics over the last 40
years as a hobby and never tried the Deoxit. As all reports seem to say
this stuff cures anything that WD 40 won't.. ( I never use WD 40 by the
way for various reasons.)

It has been a while from the last time I looked in the scope, but best I
remember that while the part you turn is a rotary switch, the contacts
are actually slide switches of sorts. Then as it was mentioned it may
attack the plastic. Some cleaners do and some don't. I used to use LPS
cleaner and never found plastic that it would affect.