[HO455]

Four hours of M&R today. The turn signal switch stopped resetting after a right turn. Easy fix I thought. One of the little springs must have broken. A common failure on older switches and with any of the new over the counter replacement springs. I've had such bad luck with the replacement springs, I scrounge every OE one I find at the u-pull-it. I believe the wire stock used to make the replacements is one grade above rebar.

In reality the plastic section that the lever operates was cracked. It was almost completely broken across. (See arrows on photo 1) I pulled it out and used my handy dandy Harbor Freight plastic welder to make it better. I should have gotten some more pictures but, hopefully there are enough to show what I did.

I cut a 3/8" by 3/8" piece of the stainless mesh and folded it 90 degrees corner to corner making 2 triangles. I then laid it over the crack on the top and the inside of the section and melted it into the plastic. (Photo 2)

The outside part of the cracked area wasn't large enough for a piece of mesh so I melted a groove and added some plastic filler and reformed it as close as I could back to normal. No photo here, sorry.

When I reassembled the switch I noticed that I did in fact have a broken spring. In all the previous instances I've had the "no return" problem the spring was broken in two pieces and was easy to spot. This time the spring was more splintered instead of broken. I had to carefully examine it to tell it was defective. My junk yard scrounging paid off today.

Once it was all back together it worked nice and smooth. I also found the base piece of the switch is also cracked near the detent springs. The plastic there is so thin and delicate I didn't want to attempt a weld on it for fear of destroying it.

Things are working nicely for now but, I will order a new switch because I'm sure the bottom piece is going to cause problems at some point.

A quick search shows people are mostly happy with the American Autowire replacement switch so I am leaning to that one at present.