Vintage Fender Footswitch Sheilded cable repair help?

[carlsoti]

    Hey all. I've been tasked with repairing an amp for a friend. It's a 1966 Fender Princeton Reverb in not-perfect, but really good condition that seems to be all original and loaded with O.S. period correct Mullard and RCA tubes. With the foot-switch jacks unplugged, the amp works perfectly and sounds fantastic. It appears as if the foot-switch jacks got bashed in at some point. The signal conductor of the reverb side is visibly broken, and the shielded portion has seen better days.

Normally, this would be a really simple fix, but I have two competing issues. First, the amp seems to be all original, and I want to minimize the amount of modification necessary to bring it back to 100%. The other is that there appears to me some sort of oil soaked into the first few inches of the shielded cable in the damaged area.  So my options, as I see it, are to simply lop off the grungy end of the cable and re-solder both of the RCAs to restore appearance and functionality, or figure out how to get the oil off the shielding and only cut off the damaged portion of the reverb cable before re-soldering that plug. 

The answer to this question will sway me one way or the other. Is the center insulator on these old cables fabric or plastic?

Or maybe I'm overthinking this? Since it's not a "perfect" Museum Quality example of a vintage tube amp, a slightly shorter, but working original footswitch have a minimal impact on the overall value of the amp.

Please let me know what you all think.

Thanks.

TDC

[newey]

Oct 23, 2021 11:55:37 GMT -5 carlsoti said:

Since it's not a "perfect" Museum Quality example of a vintage tube amp, a slightly shorter, but working original footswitch have a minimal impact on the overall value of the amp.

I would think that, even if you replaced the entire footswitch with another "period correct" one, the value wouldn't suffer much, if at all. Modificatiuons hurt the value, but repairs generally don't, so long as the materials used are NOS replacements. It's like a classic car, the assumption is that the tires would have been replaced at some point, the brakes relined, etc. Replacing the tubes with NOS ones wouldn't hurt the value, a buyer will assume that the originals weren't going to last forever.

As to the leaking oily stuff, you might want to look closely at the chassis near where that reverb switch plug is located, make sure it isn't coming from the innards of the amp and leaked into that jack area.

[carlsoti]

Thanks, newey. I thought that may be the case, but I've honestly never had something like this on my bench. The only amps I've worked on that were this old came to me is such shape that I really couldn't make anything worse. I've completely disassembled the amp, and found no evidence of goop inside the amp, just all original, unmolested, vintage circuitry.

Also, I may be a bit biased towards the "lop off a chunk of wire" fix, as it's amuch less fiddly/fussy repair.

[newey]

Oct 23, 2021 12:27:43 GMT -5 carlsoti said:

Also, I may be a bit biased towards the "lop off a chunk of wire" fix, as it's amuch less fiddly/fussy repair.

I think that would be fine. What, a buyer is going to measure the cable???

[thetragichero]

yup just cut some of the wire and make it like new again

and then have the over throw the original switch into a drawer and pony up the 25 bucks for one of these to use while playing: www.tubesandmore.com/products/footswitch-box-fender-two-button-vintage-rca-plugs