Dirty pots or dead vintage pedal?

[gingataff]

I tried out a great pedal in a shop yesterday which I'm quite interested in buying (the pedal, not the shop). It's a mid '70s Systech Overdrive, and has a nice meaty distortion but the real feature is the EQ control which is like a wah filter.

The basic tone was pretty good but[/b] the drive and gain pots were very noisy and no amount of twisting them seemed to clean the contacts, the sound also started to fade (not quite cutting out) at one point. Even more annoying the EQ pot although not noisy had a very uneven sweep, jumping a lot around the 3 o'clock position.

Does this sound like a simple case of needing to clean or replace the pots or could there be something more sinister going on inside?

Help me BKP techies, you're my only hope!

[greg]

hi gingataff,
if the price was good i would buy it and try to clean pots.
in most cases it helps, but this one is from 70's so might need pots replacement. if contact spray won't help take the metal casings off and clean gently a resistance path and a metal contact using the same spray and a paper tissue.
check in the shop if the pots themselves (resistance path in a pot) are not broken. just turn knobs when the pedal is unplugged. if there is no any crackles coming from inside the pedal and a knob is not turning too loosely it should be ok.
also at the last stage i would take the knobs off and check if shafts are kind of standard. the pedal is old and it might be difficult to get the same pots in case of replacement.
let us know