Rotary switch question: how to "lock" in certain p

[mrsage]

I have a relative newbie question...

I've never worked with rotary switches before, but in my experience they're usually "locked" to certain positions. For instance, if you have a 7-position rotary switch, it's usually only wired up for 3 or 4 of the positions.

Case in point:

I just got a used Lovetone Meatball for an absolute steal of a price. The only thing wrong is that several of the switches don't have the stoppers on them to keep them from going out of position. Add to that the fact that the chickenhead knobs are all a bit off, and you're left with a pedal that you're never sure is set correctly.

I can mess with it and get everything set correctly. Then I can adjust the chickenhead knobs so that they're positioned properly.

But how do I fix it so that the rotary switches don't go beyond their intended positions? Is this something simple, or would it require new switches?

[niftydog]

depends on the type of rotary switch. Most that I've encountered have a removable ring with a tab which can be inserted into the switch several ways. Basically you set it up so that it stops the switch at the pole that you want to be the last one.

[sir_modulus]

I just went down and looked, and all my old ones use a little post that goes into teh switch, and mechanically stops movement.

Hope that helps,

Nish

[mrsage]

Man those rotary switches are a pain in the ass.

Thanks for the help, though. I didn't want to dive in without any base knowledge of what I was doing. Looks like whoever took this puppy apart last didn't know what they were doing, so they ended up putting the removable ring outside the case as a washer! Good thing they did, though, or I would have had to look for new ones. If I had been in charge of that and didn't know what those things were, I would have thought they were weird washers...I probably would have trashed them and put in regular washers! So it was good that they were as least there...

The pain in the ass part was figuring out whether Position 1 was all the way clockwise or all the way counter-clockwise. Then I had to figure out which slot the little tab went into. My fingertips hurt from screwing and unscrewing the little set screws in the chickenhead knobs....probably 50 different times altogether. And everything is soldered to the PCB, so I had to take off all the nuts for every pot and jack to get access to the rotary switches. And to fuel my frustration, I thought I had finished, I plugged in for a test, and it turned out that I had two of the switches oriented the wrong way...so I had to go back, remove the tabbed washers, turn the knobs (which requires reattaching the chickenheads...these switches are very hard to turn with just fingertips), re-set the tabs, and try again.

Whew.

If simply setting the switches and orienting the knobs is this much work, it's no wonder Lovetones go for so much! It's probably a couple hundred dollars (pounds) worth of labor (labour) to get everything in there and working properly!

Anyway, this is a long message that could be boiled down to nine words:

"Thanks for the help guys! I figured it out!"