Wonder if ordinary "di-electric grease" would work on tube pins?  Anyone ever try it?

It works for old car distributors and electrical service connections, which is to say, other high votage applications.

Like I said in the ML2 thread a few posts back, I found out the hard way that Caig "contact cleaner/enhancers" do not survive the tube pin environment, not to mention truly disasterous results with the old "Tweak" "enhancer", not just on tube pins (eeek!!!) but on ANYTHING.  A common pattern for not-up-to-it "enhancers" is, sounds better at first but quickly declines to way worse, then it's a PITA to clean it off.

Do I have to be the Guinea pig?

Paul S

…. what tube’s socket is arcing. If the tube juts started to ark then bending the tube legs, cleaning the sockets 9scabng the meta with no marks of the ark left) and treating it with conceive grease might help. Do not forget that most of the sockets have pretty much a point contact (unfortunately) and bending the socket’s legs you juts offset the contact point to the location that was not damaged by ark.

If your socket was juts was crappy to begin with, got rusty or it has no good access to maintain it then it would be easy to replaces the socket. On your ML2 (if you are taking about the small tubes) you would need to lift the circuit board, you do not need to take it away, juts to lift it. It is 10 min ceremony: Remove a dozen or so of little screws from the PC-board, un-screw input jackets, take 3 connectors from the right side of the board and the board will be set free to open up as book’s page. If you can solder well then you have no problem to put a new socket, if not invite somebody who has good soldering skills. BTW, the soldering skills of people who assemble ML2 are superb, and it assembled VERY tasty. I just wish they do Lamm point-to-point with the stupid PC boards… 

If you are in small tube world and have no option to deal with above then find a plug-in adopter with fat legs and use it between the damaged socket and the tube. The fat pins might stretch the socket’s pins and world offset the burned socket’s contact point.

If you have problem with the large tubes then I would not bother and to replace the old sockets. It is PERFECTLY NORMAL to replace the 6C33C’s sockets one in 2-3 years. Lamm used Russian and Chinese sockets, they are very bad, and they MUST burn in 2-3 years of heavy use. There is very easy access to them in ML2 and it is very simple to replace them, do not forget to discharge the PS cap’s before you do it. It is also a good idea to put there US-made Johnson’s sockets – the will work for yea and they have no conus-contact (like Russian) but a line-contact.