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My Line 6 Variax 300 has been having some noise issues relating to the jack socket so I decided to strip it down and use some deoxidising spray to try to clean up the contacts. The jack socket is soldered to a PCB and fitted to a curved plate. It has a plastic body and an externally threaded chromed nut. Trying to reassemble the socket onto to the panel is a fiddly job and I had endless trouble. The nut would appear to start OK but inevitably end up cross-threaded, with the result that a jack would be difficult or impossible to insert. This immediately brought to mind a recent Facebook Marketplace advert for a Variax 300 where the seller mentioned that the jack socket was stiff.
Back in the day Cliff jack sockets were made with a brass threaded insert that was practically impossible to cross-thread. Here's one from those golden days: Thanks to "value engineering" those days and brass inserts are long gone and instead we have the more compliant (= easily cross-threaded) full plastic body. So, how to ensure you don't cross-thread when reassembling the jack socket? Answer: Put the jack through the nut into the socket and screw the nut in by hand, pushing the plug in as you go. My old Xcelite kit has a socket with a recess large enough to take the back of the jack, but probably a ring spanner would also do for the final turn or two. As the French say... TBH, I might swap the socket out for one with gold-flashed contacts to avoid future corrosion/oxidation issues.

they're not really building stuff to last anymore, are they?

^ my good friends’ drama with there newish house purchase.

Couldn't find a gold-plated/gold flashed one without ridiculous shipping so just got a Cliff one from CDC Farnell that cured the noise problem for now.