Solid State Guitar Amp Forum | DIY Guitar Amplifiers

I have a SWR Workingman's 160 Bass Amp that crackles when the knobs are turned. I've tried different instruments/cables to no avail. I emailed a repair guy with some photos of the external surface of the amp to ask if he repairs this model and he said seeing the corrosion on the outside that it's highly likely that it's corrosion on the inside causing the crackle.

I've taken the casing off today an the unit is surprisingly clean on the inside. However there are small orange looking patches on the solder and I'd like to know if this was a classed as corrosion?

Attempted to attach pics to no avail. I'd like to know if I should just st throw this in the bin & get a new amp? Any thoughts appreciated.
Thank you.

I had an amp with terribly scratchy controls that I was able to clean up with DeoxIT and now it works great.  If the crackling isn't too bad, you may be able to get rid of it simply by rotating the knobs back and forth a bunch of times as they tend to get scratchy when they're not used regularly.  If it's worse try spraying some DeoxIT into each pot and then rotating the knob back and forth a few times.  You don't need to spray very much into each pot and be sure to clean up and dry off any residue or overspray.  If that still doesn't fix it, you may need to replace the pots.

As for the orange spots, it's tough to say without seeing them, but it sounds like it could just be some rosin flux residue from the solder.  If that's the case, I would not consider it to be corrosion.

SOunds like common noisy controls, and as Dino says, a squirt of Deoxit into each control and then a twist back and forth a couple times will usually clean them up.

Any competent tech can handle this if you don't feel up to it.