Sorry for reviving this old thread but I do have a question for anybody who has been building their own switches:
I'm restoring an old Paragon and some of the switches are wholesale missing and of the missing ones not all of them I've found can be bought at the usual resources.
I got from Steve and Jimmy at PBR all pieces that I need to build switches myself (Blades, Contacts, Spacers, Fish Paper, Lifters, Screw hole tubing and so on).
I also have access to a working Paragon and can just copy the switches, so I have everything to just assemble a new switch as needed.
While playing with this last night though I've found that the screw hole tubing when I try to get that into the the fiber spacers holes, the holes in the fiber spacers are so incredibly tight you can barely get the tubing in (that's what she said, ha) and a far cry from slipping the spacers down the length of the tuging.
When you build the switches how do you go about it?
I was thinking to get a little round diamond needle file to make the holes in the spacers a tiny tiny bit larger.
Alternative I could maybe try to take a little sandpaper to the plastic tuning.
Maybe try to hammer the tubing into the holes gently but that seems a good recipe to break the tubing.
Finally I was thinking about building a jig like in the drawing, and a little press block that has just 2 holes 3/8 apart with slightly larger then the size of the tubing to press down evenly from the top, or even hammer it down if needed. For that I suppose the greatest difficulty would be to drill the holes in the base at the absolute precise spacing.
Any thought?
Switch Building Jig (resized).jpg
