Probably should upgrade to relays rather than just fixing up the switches, but that's a job for another day. For now I wanted to post some photos of what to expect when taking apart your power windows switches. This is no great revelation, just a nice reference if you are thinking of cleaning them up. It's super easy, just somewhat time consuming.

The switches come apart really easily by just slipping a thin flat-blade up under the tabs and gently sliding out the base. Once inside you'll see all the coffee and schmutz chronicling years of happy up and down.

Take each little part, clean off all of the filth and lube them back up with dielectric grease, this is for functionality as well as to keep everything stuck together when reassembling. And just enough of it, don't go nuts. None of it should get on the contacts.

The meat of it is the carbon burns on the contacts that got you into this job. For those, don't be tempted to use sandpaper or a metal file to clean them up, just a relatively soft brass brush. You want to balance the clean up with also leaving as much of the original material as possible. Think of it as polishing rather than removing a lot of material. I used a small brass brush and a dremel on super low speed.




Here are some photos of the internals, not too funky but will benefit from a clean up. It's a pretty awesome design meant to handle some decent current, and the brass rollers are nice touch.



Reassembly is pretty easy, don't force it if doesn't go easily.

 

Nice write-up. This is recommended even if you do the relay mod. I have done it a few times over the years and think of it as a service item.

 

Nice job! Thank you for sharing the info!

 

nice work. i vote sticky.

 

Awesome piece of information, thanks for sharing!