Repair Switch procedure

I went to check the valves adjustment on my 85 V65 Sabre. The radiator had to come off...as I pulled the wires off the fan's thermo switch, one of the termal blades came off with the wire's plug. Crap. Well it was time to see what made that switch work and dig into it's innards Well as I was dicking around I managed to distort one of the pieces inside so when I got it back together it wouldn't activate (switch on) in boiling water. Well I put in on the radiator and ran the bike to 6 bars, just before boiling on the heat gage. The fan never did turn on. It needs to turn on at 5 bars. OK, back to the drawing board. Keep in mind that a new one from Napa (83 Honda Accord) only costs about 20 dollars. You do have to work with bullet terminals though. So inorder to show my utter contempt for remunerative endeavor, I went back inside my switch, and began fiddling with different bends of the fiddly bits till I got the switch to trip just before the water boiled. A new test on the bike showed that the Fan came on after it had been at 4 bars for a minute or so. That's quite a bit too soon. Actually probably about 10 degrees too soon. So off the bike and back into the kitchen to mess with the innards some more. This time a test showed that the fan come on shortly after it turns to five bars on the heat gage.....and turns off again pretty soon, about 15 seconds. I think I'll go with that. All in all I have a couple days in this repair. Not very economical, but the satisfaction of learning how it works was priceless. Well, that may be an exaggeration. LOL But what I have learned is that there are make and break points in there that need cleaning when these switches quit working, and if you don't bend anything inside, (like I did) the switch doesn't need to be re-calibrated, if you just clean the points. The location of those point is about .200" from the base of the terminal spades. Don't drill this hole as you mose likely will screw up the innards, use a Dremel and a 3/16 stone.

From bike repairs

My drawing isn't perfect, but it give an accurate depiction of the points and terminal spades. Neither spade is connected to the switch body. So how to clean the points? You need to grind thru the side of the bakelite at the base of the spades on both side so that you can see thru the switch at the points. At that time you get a small thin piece of metal that you can run between the point. Wrap a piece of wet and dry sandpaper over the end of your thin piece of metal and sand away. Test continuity in boiling water before you seal it up with devcon 2 part. ...... then reinstall and be happy. Just to get this down on paper, since I had a broken terminal spade which required the points end of that spade had to be butt soldered back together to make a complete spade terminal, I had to reinstall the spade at a particular gap, since I didn't know what the original gap was. That gap will determine how long the switch remains in the on position. I used an .015" gap. Next time I'd use .030" This might be important info to someone in BFE....probably not so much for someone with a Napa store nearby.