[comp.sys.amiga.hardware] Mouse button rejuvenation!

efp90@ecs.soton.ac.uk (Pritchard EF) (06/12/91)

  Six (or maybe more) months ago on this board, there was a whole series of 
articles about restoring your Commodore mouse to life, including rewiring the
microswitches to use the unused contacts, and completely replacing the switches
for the buttons. Well, here's my fix!

  My mouse buttons where getting increasingly querky, often needing hard
concentration to get the left button to click or drag. Resizing or moving
windows was a real pain, the button losing contact all the time, and dropping 
the window, or worse dropping icons into the wrong drawer. Using DPaint was
outrageous, rubber banded lines kept ending prematurely, cutting brushes was
a horror story of frustration as the box was finalized prematurely. ARGHHHHH!
I tried the rewiring trick- no joy at all, no improvement. Finally, after a few
months of this (too many months) I got angry, real mean. I pulled a knife and
layed it on the line to Mr. Mousey... and unscrewed the cover, gripped the
round top of the microswitch (the actual button) with the knife and pushed it
in to contact while rotating the button (thanks to the grip the knife had on 
the plastic). Voila! Upon plugging the mouse in again, and rebooting I had
one working mouse, and was able to happily drag and click to my hearts content,
while rediscovering my creativity...

  I do not know how this worked, but it may be worth others having a try. Just
grip the round (black?) actual button bit of the microswitch (probably with a knife blade), depress and rotate quite firmly. My mouse has both contacts on the microswitches wired in parallel also. 

  Hope this works for someone else out there! (maybe I just convinced the mouse
that I ment business!)

E.F.Pritchard.
efp90@uk.ac.soton.ecs