[kiwi_steve]

Well, I got a bit carried away with the cleaning... the yellow stuff (nicotine?) takes a bit of getting rid of...

I noticed that you were cleaning an aluminum electrolytic capacitor at the time.

Do you have Mother's Mag & Aluminum Polish available in NZ? That stuff is great for cleaning and polishing aluminum parts such as old aluminum electrolytics. Mind you, though, it will also remove anything printed on the can!

We have some Mothers stuff available here - I have been using Autosol for polishing aluminium (the Airline 62-316 I posted previously about is a shining example of that in action).  The nice thing about the rust remover is that its not hard on pencil or pen marks - there is some writing on the back of the chassis which is still there despite me cleaning it... if I'd used Autosol, as you say with the Mothers product, everything would be gone.

I wasn't going for a full restoration here either... just a clean up.  The results for 3-4 days of part-time work are pretty good by my usual standards... this kind of thing used to take me months and the cabinets would worry me into inaction... so I kind of just took the 'git-er-done' approach and used what I had. 

Its developed a fault in the dial light though, so I need to pull it apart again.  Possibly one of the lamps - which are probably pretty old.  I might just LED it.  I have some 12V LED strip which will be dimmer than the 5V stuff I was using and might be a little more mood-appropriate for the set.