Another ARP slider thread - help?

1

Another newbie question from yours truly. In short, I think I have some sliders that are beyond cleaning/repair, but I’m hoping I’m wrong!

I have an ARP Avatar that is misbehaving and I can trace the problem to the sliders. In the ADSR for example, the attack slider will have a super short attack or nearly infinite attack, with only one tiny spot on the slider where there’s anything in between. Similarly the release is super long anywhere but the first couple mm of slider.

When I measure the ohms across the span of the slider, I can see they jump to full for nearly all of the span of the slider. Consistent with what I’m hearing.

I’ve successfully cleaned ARP sliders before- with the help of Syntaur’s great videos.

I took one apart to take a look - it was pretty gnarly with bright green stuff and grease and grime. Cleaned it thoroughly with isopropyl alcohol and reassembled, then figured I’d do this with the other ADSR sliders that had similar behavior.

They all cleaned up well, I was optimistic this would restore the ADSR - but it didn’t. The sliders still show the same resistance problem when measured and when played.

I’ve read that some pots have a resistive coating, and that it can get worn away. Do these ARP sliders die this way? Any other thoughts? I’d prefer to repair these sliders if it’s possible.

THANKS!

2

That resistive track inside the pot can certainly get damaged - rather than just dirty - and if that happens, there’s pretty much no option other than replacing it. It sounds like that is where you are with this one. Sorry for the bad news!

Save the old pot, though, because you can swap out the lever between any of those Arp pots, and that is often what gets broken. Maybe you can find someone who has the pot you need with a broken lever…

3

Thank you Sam! This is very helpful to confirm, even though it’s a mild bummer. Interesting in this Avatar there are ~10 bad sliders, and I think 8 of those are 1 MEG sliders. Not sure if the 1 MEG resistive strips are more delicate (?), or if those particular sliders just got used/abused more, or cleaned/lubed with the wrong stuff.

I’ll definitely keep the bad sliders for parts in the future!

Thanks again.