Where to find spare Plaroad switches

As I suggested earlier, ebay throws up lots of results, but not so many with a 6mm switch arm (3mm is commonest), but you can find them. As far as I can see, these are pretty much identical:

On-Off Mini Slide Toggle Switch 3pin 1P2T 2 Position Handle Length 6mm

   

I don't believe small dimensional variations will make any difference to fitting and operation.

You should be able to find the same ones wherever you are.  As a bonus, it only took me about two hours to get mine re-assembled and working again. It would have been a lot easier if I had de-soldered some of the wires and re-soldered them at the appropriate stage of assembly. Good luck with that!

[Super]

Thank you for doing the detailed research for us Dr Chris

Moving on, let's have a look at a regular Motor Tomica / Tomica World vehicle. This is Motor Tomica A-07 Mitsubishi Pajero, but (I think) they're all pretty much the same switch mechanism.

This view shows the gear train with the white selector fork on the right.

   

The next picture shows the white selector fork lifted out. It turns out that the fork and the on-off knob are one integral piece of white plastic. There is no electrical component switch of the kind seen in Terence further back in this thread.

   

If you have one of these vehicles with a broken-off switch knob, you have to either fabricate a new plastic assembly somehow, or cannibalise a junk vehicle.  I have several with this problem, but it's very difficult to imagine how it could have happened. Presumably something caused the mechanism to seize up and the previous owner took extreme measures to try and make the switch move.

Here we see the underside of the vehicle with the undertray removed. The electrical 'on' contact is made by moving the white switch knob down, which moves plate A down so that the bent down part of the plate (above the top of the 'A') slides over the battery terminal extension B.

   

So in their infinite wisdom Tomy took this simple mechanism with minimal wiring and easy assembly, and replaced it with the nightmare complexity that I found inside Terence.  Presumably there was a reason, but on the evidence I've seen it's hard to see what it would have been, unless the problem alluded to above was more prevalent than I'd imagined.

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Finally (?), I leave you with this sad scene, reminiscent of the Mojave Desert.

   

This is how Terence looked when I opened it for the first time. Very sad.
   

This is how Terence looked when I opened it for the first time. Very sad.

Wow... did you recover it from the bottom of the ocean? 😁

Probably! I mean, it came with the full set but probably Terence take a rest in the seaside for a while before. 😊