Hi Steve,
This has been an ongoing frustration for me and by the size of
this post you can see I have spent some time trying to solve it!
I actually set up a complete mockup in my basement this winter and
studied the mechanism and tried to see what happens. The vertical
spring pushes on a piece of steel angle that ise attached to the post
of the actual beveled slide (as an aside, I have several spare foot
pedals and I discovered GE made two different lengths of posts). The
slide post has another small spring to maintain some compression
against the actual switches, but not so much that it eliminates this
post from being tilted upwards slightly under pressure from the large
vertical spring (this compression of the post's small spring also
affects the ability of the slide to move up and down freely.
Unfortunately, this compression is arbitrarily determined simply by
how far the push nut is installed onto the end of the slide post.)
This eccentric action then "cants" the piece of steel angle and it
"wedges" itself stuck. Sort of like an old drawer that gets pushed
closed on one side only and it gets stuck from "canting" in the space
provided.
On my E-20's I have seen remnants of previous owners' attempts at
solving this "sticky" problem; external pull springs, or little welded
curbs around the base of the vertical spring. Neither, in my opinion,
addresses the core design flaw.
I am testing two solutions (one on each E-20) that I came up with.
Both designed to minimize the post from being pushed eccentrically
(thus keeping the steel angle from wedging).
Mike
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* SteveS <Stevesgroups verizon net>
*To:* Elec-trak <elec-trak cosmos phy tufts edu>
*Sent:* Sunday, May 19, 2013 2:14 PM
*Subject:* (ET) E20 Foot Switch Lube
Every now and then my E20 foot switch sticks just enough so it doesn't
come all the way back up. This makes it so it will not run again after
changing direction or depressing the brake unless I manually pull the
slider back up (pulling up on the foot pedal usually does not do it).
I've cleaned it and tried various lubes on it (forget what I tried last
time), but evidently I don't have it set up right. It's like the spring
isn't strong enough, but I suspect it is really misalignment or an
error
in lubrication (too much, too little, wrong type).
Any words of wisdom?
Thanks,
SteveS
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