How to clean loctal tube sockets?

[earlyfilm]

Originally Posted by cbenham

The Philco set in my avatar has several loctal tubes that cause interruptions in the picture and crashing noises in the sound.

Anyone know some good tricks to making these 60+ year old sockets reliable again?

Cliff,

I've not talked to one of those little buggers in 50 years, but the way we handled them in the late 1950's was to see if the set trouble was possibly in the circuit where the loctal was, and if not, leave the thing alone! It was SOP to never pull them for routine testing.

However, if the set issue indicated a possibly the loctals were at fault, we would attempt to pull the tube, which could be extremely difficult if a mouse had visited the set.

After testing the tube, we polished the locking clamps on the socket and tube base, with a rag wet with GC tuner cleaner. We then soused both the socket and the tube base with cleaner and inserted and removed the tube half a dozen times. Since GC tuner cleaner was a conductor when wet, we let the set dry at least 12 hours, then reinserted the tube, and started normal service procedures.

At that time, one could still buy replacement sockets, but the only ones I remember replacing happened after mice visits.

James