Conductive Grease?

I'd think you want clean and dry surfaces. Any lubricant is going to be an insulator, as is (most) dust it traps. A little more contact pressure seems a liklier bet without actually seeing and handling the device.

Is it possible to verfy the poor contact hypothesis with an ohmmeter?

It's possible to make conductive pastes by adding metal or carbon powder to to a viscous fluid, but the conductivity is poor comparatively.

bob prohaska

Check out "NO-OX-ID A-Special" antioxidant grease - it's made specifically for this sort of purpose.

Thanks, Dave. I'll give it a shot.

Powdered graphite used for locks perhaps?

Powder? Not so much. But they do make a graphite grease and I plan to try that if the other ideas fail.

Limiting the spread of a very fine conductive powder might be easier said than done!

Apart from graphite grease, have you considered a molybdenum sulfide based grease? It's also conductive, and MoS2 has similar properties to graphite as a lubricant. However, according to

With conductive particles in a non-conductive medium, the proportion of conductive material is quite critical. Conduction only begins to occur when there are enough particles to touch each other, so you will need to check your graphite grese for conductivity with a couple of ohm-meter prods. You might be better off adding just enough grease to graphite powder to make it stick and not blow about.

(This explains why most zinc-based primers are useless, because the zinc particles aren't touching and cannot contribute any electrolytic action.)