Fender Deluxe 85 cutting out: fixed by replacing jacks

[geertjacobs]

Found a Fender Deluxe 85 that needed some care: crackle in pots, sound was cutting out from time to time and it needed a good cleaning.

First cleaned the amp, then used contact spray to clean the pots.
I tilted the amp after applying the contact spray, so the contact spray was kept away (somewhat) from the lubricated pot shaft. That seems to have helped in preserving the nice "feeling" of the pot while still cleaning it. FWIW.

The amp was then sounding ok, but after a few minutes of playing the amp still cut out regularly when strumming hard. Web searches indicated that the pcb mounted jacks in these amps can be problematic. So I found some reasonably priced replacements (prices seem to vary quite a bit). The old jacks have a transparent top plate (nuts were quite rusty). The new jacks look cheaper (one big plastic part) but work better.
After replacing all 6 jacks the cutting out is gone.

The clean channel is quite usable, the distortion channel needs quite some tweaking. The parallel channel feature seems rare, haven't played around with it yet.
Nice amp for the price.