July 22nd, 2025
I assumed that, after sixty years without any cleaning, the switches in the handlebar would probably need some cleaning. I figured it would be a simple matter: take them apart, clean them with a swab and alcohol, and put them back together. Boy, was I wrong! It turns out that these things must have been assembled with special tools at the factory. Here I will show you what I had to go through with just one switch. This is the switch for setting the headlight to high beam or low beam. Electrically, it’s simple: one line carries the 12 volt power, and there are two possible connections for it: one to the high beam of the headlight and the other to the low beam of the headlight.
Here’s a diagram showing schematically how the switch works:
Here’s the real thing:
The tiny spring goes into the hole in the black plastic piece just above it. This is not too difficult, but there isn’t enough room in there for two fingers, so it’s a bit of a challenge shepherding it into position with one finger.
Once the spring is in position, I had to place the brass thingy over it. I did this with tweezers:
However, there’s a catch. The sides of the brass thingy must fit into to the slots on either side of the spring, but the brass tabs are too short to reach the slots while it’s sitting on top of the spring. Hence, I had to hold the brass thingy down with my finger. But what then? If I removed my finger, the spring would catapult the brass thingy away. Not good. So I came up with a clever solution. I pulled out my feeler gauge, which consists of a set of thin but strong metal blades. Carefully, carefully, I wiggled the metal blade between my finger and the brass thingy, It took a great many tries, but eventually I succeeded in getting the metal blade holding down the brass thingy:
With that accomplished, all I had to do was insert the little board holding the three metal contacts into the space just above the metal blade. I couldn’t get a photo of the process because, alas, I had to shed my third arm when I arrived on earth.
And then there was this pushbutton to assemble:
It is mostly complete; the only remaining task in this photo is to somehow push the spring away from the board on the right and push the brass piece on the far right into the gap between the spring and the board. This required one hand to push the spring back and one hand to push the brass piece into position, and a third hand to hold the entire piece steady while doing all this. Lacking my third arm, I just had to keep trying until I got lucky.
Fun, fun, fun...