Possibly sell F50, but there's a problem

[Iceman63]

Hello all,
I have an F50 1X12 combo that I may sell. It's in great condition, only I'm having a bit of a problem with the footswitch. Going from clean channel to lean channel is fine(contour on), but going back to clean, the contour indicator light on the footswitch flickers and does'nt go all the way out sometimes, and the sound is a bit spotty for a few seconds as well. The transition back to the clean channel is not clean in other words. Not sure what to do about this. I seriously doubt Mesa will send me a new footswitch.

 

[Iceman63]

Well, ok, nevermind then.

 

[stratele52]

I'll try to spray some contact cleaner on the switch, Spray around the switch schaft, if you have no acces hole for switch contact.

The contact cleaner will go inside the swich and could fix it.

 

[Don]

I would clean the cable's connectors and jacks as well.

I don't how long MB's warranty is in Canada or how much access you have to an MB tech, but my local MB tech is 15 minutes away from me and deals with issues like this pretty quickly.

 

[Authorized Boogie]

Iceman -

You could certainly try spraying a small amount of some good contact cleaner on the cable ends and exercising the cable in and out of the footswitch and amp jack and see if that helps. I would also wiggle the cable in the jack on the amp and on the footswitch and see of the problem happens or goes away when you do this. If it does change when you wiggle the cable, it's more likely to be the cable than the jack.

If you wiggle the cable at one end and it affects the problem. Try flipping the ends of the cable from footswitch to amp and see if the problem follows the cable move. If it doesn't you might suspect the jack at that point but we've seen very DIN jacks go bad - cables are much more likely to fail or be mishandled in general.

The F50 uses a 5 pin din cable and its possible that there is a short/crimp somewhere along the length of the cable. Or, it may be that one of the pins on either end of the cable has gotten loose/intermittant or disconnected at one end of the DIN plug which would require replacing the DIN cable.

Finally, it's possible that the actual switch on the footswitch is bad but this is a lot more rare than cables going bad. If it is the switch then it's possible to replace the switch on the footswitch.

Cables are covered under warranty for 6 months from the date of sale and footswitches are covered under the Mesa 5 year warranty if purchased during the time that the 5 year warranty was in effect. Basically all F- series amps fall under the 5 year warranty as both F series amps and the % year warranty both started in January 2002.

Hope this helps. Let us know what you found.

Authorized Boogie