Toggle switch contacts

[DanR]

To anyone that is ever brave enough to open up and clean a toggle switch, I opened up one of my unusable ones for practice. Open by ever so slightly prying on the metal tabs. Here are pictures of an early fog light switch after I cleaned up all the green corrosion off the copper contacts. A word of warning, once opened do not actually toggle the switch as the springs may vanish.

[Nissanman]

None of my toggles switches were functional.
I managed to resurrect all of them by flood cleaning them with an aerosol contact cleaner and lubricator.
They vomited forth a black substance which I assume was years of dirt and grease.
I didn't want to open them up as you have pointed out, too much to go flying and never to be seen again.

[spl310]

But did you fix it?

[DanR]

The switch pictured that I don't use is now making good contact, I will pull my usable fog light switch that needs attention and report back on that one later.

[DanR]

Here is the fog switch directly from my car, this switch would need some wiggling to get contact, even then it was hardly reliable. After some cleaning it now works just fine.

[spl310]

Very cool! Do you put any dielectric grease in there?

[DanR]

No I didn't put any grease in there, I would recommend it though for how nasty they seemed to get inside. My tiny tube of grease was finally emptied from doing wiring under the hood.

Also if the plastic end where you flip the switch ever broke off, they can easily be swapped by punching out the pin in the threads. I was able to remove it with just a toothpick. Keep in mind it needs to be a similar switch, the fog light only has two positions so it will only swap with another fog switch.

[Nissanman]

As some further information, here are the pin outs of the Niles toggle switches as fitted to my '65 SP310: -

NILES switch terminal pinouts.jpg

Usually, connections to a switch are not a problem since the manufacturer fitted only those contacts needed for the switch function.
However if you needed to mix and match, the terminal number is important to mate up with the relevant wiring connectors.