Lafayette LR-5555A cleaning

[retrosounds]

Trying to clean face plate. Able to pull off the knobs except for volume/balance and input selector. Do these also pull off and I have to pull harder? Don’t want to damage it. No screw in it.

Also what do you recommend for face plate cleaning? Was thinking dawn and water. Maybe magic eraser

 

[Sansuiman]

Be careful with Dawn, it has a small amount of chlorine type additive in it, and if in contact with with plastic or anodized aluminum for too long, it will make the finish cloudy. If the stuck knobs have no set screws, they may have been glued on at some point due to being loose. I've used spoons between the knob and faceplate (put some plastic sheet between the faceplate and spoon to prevent marring of the surface) to get leverage to push difficult knobs off.

 

[peteCWA]

The knobs pull off. They might be tight. The receiver is over 45 years old and maybe the knobs have never been pulled off.
Cleaning the faceplate; a lot depends what it's dirty from. However, I've used Windex to clean the faceplate from typical grit and grime.
Good receiver but with typically bad ALPS AC power switch.

 

[hemiram]

I've had some knobs on stuff that are almost like they are glued on. One reciever, I think it was a Nikko I was cleaning and recapping for a friend had a volume knob that refused to come off. The pot was worn out and needed to be replaced, which would have been an easy enough job, but it just wouldn't break loose. We verified with some local tech that the knob just pulled off. We put Break Free gun lube into the back of the knob with a little needle oiler I had. Nope. I froze it with the Freezit spray. Heated it with a hair dryer, nope. Put clamps on the front panel with wood and cardboard underneath to keep from trashing the panel and the owner just grabbed it, and yanked way harder than was smart, and it went CRACK, and off came the knob. The panel was OK! It looked like that one knob had corroded and just attached itself to the steel pot shaft.

The hardest one of anything I owned to get off was the tuning knob on a Yaesu FRG-8800 Shortwave receiver. The knob's rubber ring rotted really quickly, and Yaesu sent me a new tuning knob. The knob has like a speed nut in it that is kind of a one way latch. I pulled so hard on it that the plastic front panel started to bend, so out came the Dremel and after a lot of drilling and cutting slots into it, I twisted a screwdriver in it, and it came apart. What was wrong with using a set screw?