Making your own leaf switches

Tornadoboy

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I was just wondering, has anyone here made their own leaf switches? They're kind of pricey to get good ones and there's very little too them, I'm guessing you'd just need some strips of spring steel and some contacts that can be press fitted on. Can tungsten contacts be gotten somewhere?
 
It all seems pretty straightforward to me, spring steel strips can be gotten cheap off Ebay, and the spacers can be made out of a whole host of different materials, it's just the contacts themselves I haven't been able to source.

Sure you could just have them conduct without actual contacts, but that would probably be pretty unreliable, and thus far searching for loose silver and tungsten contacts has yielded nothing but stuff with them already installed, I'm just looking for the contacts themselves ready to be pressed in place.
 
Leaf switches are only a couple of bucks, unless you are talking about some of the double contact ones that are rather highly priced. It seems like you could save a few cents, maybe, but is it really worth it? Doesn't seem like it is worth the effort to me.
 
Leaf switches are only a couple of bucks, unless you are talking about some of the double contact ones that are rather highly priced. It seems like you could save a few cents, maybe, but is it really worth it? Doesn't seem like it is worth the effort to me.

agreed....
 
You should see the inside of an EM pinball machine, you'd be in heaven :p Switch blades EVERYWHERE
 
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