Selector Unit Cleaning & Reassembly

Disassembly of the Selector Unit "pin bank" (previous post) revealed parts that were quite dirty:

And my initial fear and concern upon on seeing this was with regards to corrosion. However, as shall be seen, thankfully those concerns were unnecessary.

A close-up of the inner portion of one part of the pin bank:

Knowing that I had spare parts to fall back upon, in case I messed something up, was certainly a factor in my decision on how to proceed, because had I not had these parts, I would have been more conservative in my approach to what cleaning chemicals, if any, to use. From the disassembly process I found some blank-off plates that seemed to be of the same material as seen in the pictures above, and I used these as "test studies", just in case...

One I soaked in "Formula 409" cleaner for an hour, and the other I soaked in "Mr. Clean" for an equal amount of time. What I found after, thankfully, was that neither had swelled-up in any measurable way, and that both cleaners seemed to be equally effective- meaning hardly at all! "Truly, this was some "serious" gunk", I thought....


But then I broke-out some 00 gauge steel wool, and with some good ol' sweat and "elbow grease", the results were both immediate and satisfying:

It was nice to have clean parts, sure, but the next step (reassembly) was the part of the procedure that I had consistently read was going to be a Pain In The Butt!

Before continuing, I need to point out that the Selector Levers have a small mark, or dimple, on the "outer" surface that can be seen either in the picture above (somewhat), or much more clearly here:

Interestingly enough, I found the Selector Levers from the 1452 were slightly bowed-out, and I assumed that this was the reason for the mark, but those from the "spare" 1438 assembly had no such marks, nor were they bowed in any way I could find. If one were to put the two assemblies side by side and give them only a cursory glance, this would be very hard to notice.

Regardless, I knew they had to be installed properly.

But doing this is easier said than done! Shifting back to Present Tense here, note that the assembly is essentially a "sandwich", with an upper piece, a lower piece, and the levers in-between, and one would think that this would be a simple procedure! Wrong! Here's the deal: Because of the different radii between the inner and outer pieces, the springs on the levers MUST be compressed when reassembling the unit, otherwise the holes will NOT line-up.

I had read of several methods on how to do this, and in the interest of (possibly? hopefully?) helping someone NOT make the same mistakes as I, I will mention them in-turn.

Method #1 involved cutting small pieces of hose, sliding them onto the ends of the levers, allowing the friction of the hose to hold the spring down/compressed. So I dun got me some of that-there hose, cut it up into short sections:

And gave it a whirl!

Except what I found was that by the time I got to about this point, the "first" hose was beginning to work it's way off the end of the lever, and it would pop-off, sometimes flying a good distance across my work bench!

No matter what I tried, and I made several attempts at this, the hoses always popped-off. Some not right way, but I never got to the point where I had all of them on at the same time. Frustrating!

Method #2 involved using alligator clips. Having failed at the first method, I decided to do a little testing first, and I used some alligator leads I owned:

Nope, that didn't work, as the clips kept snapping off, and I found that I needed more room. So I mounted the plate in my bench vice and tried again:

At first everything seemed to work, but it was right around this point that I ran out of room, and any bump or nudge on any of the wires would cause a cascade effect that caused several (many!) of them to snap-off. And if you will notice, I never even got to the pins located in the openings between the jaws of the vice! Spinning the assembly around was NOT going to be an option...

However, I felt that I was onto something here, so I ordered some smaller clips on Amazon (a box of 100 was the smallest quantity I could find), and waited for them to arrive.

Fast forward a few days....

Clips arrived, and having given this some thought in the meantime, I reasoned that I needed better access to all sides of the assembly, so I came up with this idea:

By being VERY GENTLE I was able to install all of the levers, but once again, any bump of the vice or the work bench would send them flying. And I hadn't even installed the contacts yet!

Here's the furthest along I was able to get using this method. As you can see, all of the levers are installed, as are the contacts:

Looks promising, I know, but close tolerances between the upper part and the levers required me to manipulate everything somewhat, and EACH AND EVERY SINGLE TIME I TRIED INSTALLING THE TOP, however gentle I tried to be, the whole thing would fall apart on me!

"So now what?", I thought....

Here was my answer: I went to the hardware store with one of the levers in-hand, and went straight to the tubing section, There I found various small engine gas lines of various sizes that looked good, so with the permission of the owner of the store, I cut-off very short pieces of various size tubes I thought may work, and slid them onto the lever as a Test.

And then I walked around the store a bit, allowing for some time to pass...

The "winner" was this stuff:

Which I promptly cut it up into very short pieces so that the entire section of hose was on the "flat" of the lever, and not on the sloped portion, as may be seen here:

Not wanting to commit too far to this method (I've been burned before!), I set this aside for the night.

And the next morning it was still in place!

Which was a heckuva lot longer than any other method I had tried.....

So, I installed my little sections of hose on all of the levers:

 As well as all of the contacts:

And I was quite pleased to find that I could manipulate the assembly enough to get the top part back on!

I installed the pins that hold everything together, removed the pieces of hose, and....

(Insert heavenly angels singing here!)

Since I only worked on one section: A comparison, clean versus dirty:

And after I cleaned the other section, a couple shots of the complete assembly:

Feels good!

Feels really good!