I've seen my share of switches. From itty bitty
Mitsumi Miniatures all the way up to burly
IBM beam springs. But these are (just a touch) bigger yet. Behold: Clare's High Profile Series Reed Switches:
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Mitsumi and MX on the left, and a whole lot of bigger on the right.
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I picked up a good number of these, and their caps, from the local museum. They had been in a box of parts for a decade or two, along with other caps I'll post in a separate thread.
Note the switch on the right:
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Bulb!
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Somewhat larger than an MX. These are linear switches, of course, good and smooth; I'm guessing 6 mm of travel, it's certainly deeper than Alps and the rest. Pretty heavy too, as was the style of the time. My multimeter says they conduct at what feels like 75% of the travel. It's a deep activation point, all right.
There's a little socket integrated into the switch for the detachable, LED-sized bulb. And two more contacts on the bottom. The accompanying cap has a whole different mount, with pegs either side of a central hole, which the bulb slides up into to provide (what I assume is) a nice bright and even light.
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Imagine the translucent, spherical cap in the foreground lighting up like a button on a vintage sci-fi.
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More on those back two in another thread.
Meanwhile, the other caps are mostly doubleshots, and look like this:
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That triple mount on the engraved caps is distinctive. As is the spacebar stab:
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- IMG_7417.JPG (250.26 KiB) Viewed 8840 times
Yup,
Pyrelink has these as well! His switches are the "Low Profile Series" mentioned in the same Clare-Pendar parts catalogue. Only mine are straight Clares:
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- IMG_7425.JPG (178.7 KiB) Viewed 8840 times
- IMG_7426.JPG (232.26 KiB) Viewed 8840 times
- IMG_7420.JPG (271.11 KiB) Viewed 8840 times
I've no idea what this ring is about, but it does highlight the unusual Maltese cross-section of the mount:
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As usual, I need to shoot more pictures. There's several versions of the switch, as told by the numbers. They're all the tall size, though, and Belgian! I'll get them in the wiki once I know more about them.
).
