Do you want smooth feel, or silent, crackle free operation? My experience is that pot cleaning is often the sort of thing people do before selling them, because it rarely lasts. The actual problem is actual wear. you have a carbon disk and a wiper and after years, the surface deteriorates and the extra pressure from the wiper deforms the track under it when it never moves. If you can remove and dismantle, then you can clean properly. Pots are in many ways, like video heads. Solvent, that softens and allows debris to be wiped off works very well, if the solvent is sprayed under pressure, then the loosened debris gets relocated somewhere less critical. You can use a cleaning tape, but all they do is wipe the surface clean but leave most of the rubbish in place, where it rehardens. Despite what people claim, the hand test does it for me, before I squirt it in holes. I put it on the palm of my hand, wait a few minutes and see if it totally vanishes. WD40 always leaves behind a slippery residue. Isopropyl alcohol does not. A few years back I managed to buy on amazon some empty plastic bottles with the long very thin tube - designed, I think, for thin superglue. Guitar folk use them for running down the side of frets. I put IPA into these and then poked the thin tube into the little access holes in difficult to reach pots, then a hefty squeeze and the 'schluch' seemed to do the trick. Brand new fader are not as far as I know, lubricated - the carbon has a very low coefficient of friction - it's naturally slippery. Any form of grease seems a very short term 'cure'. Any lubricant is naturally sticky - the whole point is to create a barrier between surfaces. Exactly the opposite of what you need. I'm involved in a historic lighting equipment collection and we have lighting desks with hundreds and hundreds of faders. Best success is something to remove oxidisation on the metal on metal versions and simple gentle cleaning and solvent on the carbon faders. Clearly, many of donations have been 'cleaned' with products very unsuitable. Some cleaning has actually badly damaged the tracks - some of the cleaning chemicals seem to have soaked into the carbon. One appears to have been lubricated with Vaseline petroleum jelly. I actually tried that. amazingly it worked. Three weeks later (in the winter), the fader would hardly move. No actual damage, but I have seen that suggested as a fix on audio pots and faders far too often.
I worked for a while in TV and videos were lidless, in a rack (Panasonic MII) and we used a substance called colclene - recommended on the can for being suitable for guided missiles. It was alochol with additives and was amazing stuff, but the additives are banned now. Shame! The current product is not the same.
