Husky stop switches

[treefarm]

Hi all-I've read a few threads in this section (most recent being spring of 2011) about stop switches on Husky saws not working (or working intermittently) and while working on my 28 year old model 61, found something that wasn't mentioned before, I think. I was getting the saw ready for logging Hemlock and had stripped it down, blowing it out and cleaning it up in general. The switch had usually always worked, but in recent years I had to move it to stop and wiggle it around to stop the saw.

I took out the little retainer screw, popped the switch out, blew it off and bench tested it with a Fluke meter-it turned off and on without skipping a beat a bunch of times. When the saw was back together and I was using it, the switch didn't work at all-totally dead & back to choking it to stop it, which I haven't had to do in years! Curiosity got the best of me so back to my shop I went. When I pulled it back out, bench testing showed it to be working fine once again. That's when I realized that there was perfectly intact, 28 year old orange paint where the retainer screw screwed into the saw housing. The arm that comes out of the switch that the screw passes through is also the ground for the switch to the saw, which kills the engine when you move it to stop. The screw also had a powder coating on it, so the combination of paint and coating prevented the switch from grounding the ignition and stopping the saw. When I scraped off the paint around the screw hole , and cleaned off the coating on the screw, everything works great. Hopefully that'll help in some cases.

[Kevin]

Thanks for sharing that with the group treefarm.