nad probbly wont sell you replacement parts. If it is indeed the balance pot you could either find a replacement, like said above it should say on the pot what the rating is. Or you could just bypass it out of the circuit completely by simply connecting the wires that connect to the leads to their corresponding wires. And just leave the pot in place so you dont have a hole in the faceplate.

Soldering in electronics is alot different than how plumbers solder together water pipes. No blowtorches here A decent digital multimeter would also be helpfull. There are many soldering how to's and such online, to go this link and check out the different pages, quests page has some info that you might find helpfull on soldering and such.

http://www.bottlehead.com/loosep/loosep.html

Its hard to try and diagnose and fix something through forums so your situation could be different. I dont know what your talking about when you say the tabs are bent. But whatever you do make sure you mark every wire you desolder and such and be patient.