Obviously, however, a lot of them elsewhere in this country are, if the posts from a lot of you here are any indication. The people at the Radio Shack in my area aren't nearly that ignorant of electronics (most have been able to answer any technical question I have put to them so far), at least they don't seem to be.

So much of Radio Shack's merchandise is substandard these days as was mentioned in a post here at AK some time ago, even the store personnel often do not seem to know one end of an AC power cord from the other (for example). RS was at one time an electronics store any electronics buff could trust for quality electronics, parts and supplies, but not today.

How Radio Shack can get away with such a thing is beyond me. I must have bought a good can of tuner spray this time around, not recycled motor oil or some such garbage which will gunk up the contacts worse than they were before the job was begun. I spritzed a bit of the stuff into the bandswitch and dial drive mechanism of a Zenith radio a few days ago seemed to work OK-the band switch now works a lot more smoothly than it did when I first got the set, and the tuning drive, which up to that point was sticking close to the top of the dial, now operates absolutely flawlessly from one end of the dial to the other. Honestly, however, I did not realize RS's tuner/contact cleaner was such bottom-of-the-line junk until I read EchoWars's post yesterday morning. Don't know how much a can of the latter goes for, but RS's own brand of cleaner, junk though it may be, still costs quite a bit I paid $8.99 for a small can of the stuff (I still have it in my toolbox). :scratch2: I guess I'll have to look around the local Radio Shack a bit more carefully than I did the last time I bought contact cleaner, three years ago when I was trying to restore an old radio, and get a can of DeOxit.

External tv tuner radio shack