240Z: Dome light refurbish

Regular readers may have noticed that i haven’t actually restored anything from my 240Z in a while. Well the reasons were various, but it’s time to change that again. I thought i start with a simple part which i had prepared to get done since a while. The interieur dome light:

From the outside it was mainly dirty and scratched, and on the backside you could see the contacts and the bulb metal parts were corroded:

So first i took it apart

The bulb fell apart immediately without even touching it:

First i gave everything a gentle clean in warm soap-water and tried to avoud water coming close to the switch:

Next it was time to pull out my secret weapons. I’ve got an electronics repair background and over the years i’ve gained a lot of experience which tools and fluids work the best.
Here are a selection of my all-time favourites. Which i all used for this project:
– Kontakt 60: Contact cleaning solvent (I used it a bit on the switch)
– Metarex. Some kind of wool fabric soaked in a metal cleaning and polish fluid. You rip off a piece and clean your metal surfaces without scratches.
– Contact cleaning strips: Perfect to clean corroded electronic contacts (after corrosion is removed with a brush)
– Novus plastic cleaning and polish kit. Removes larger and smaller scratches from plastic surfaces and lets you get it back nice and glossy again.

After i cleaned and polished everything and had removed the corrosion with a wire brush, i checked the switch, just to ensure it works fine. Which it luckily did. Probably i should test it BEFORE i do all the work, next time.

And then assembled it all back together. IKI Japan Dome light switch from the 240Z in all it’s glory. Btw. Also found a production date stamp (i guess?) of 3 / 71 on the lamp housing. So it was produced almost a year befor the car got registered in switzerland. While most of the other parts in the car have a production date from end of 1971. It seems like those dome lights were produced in larger batches and then stored before being used.