One of the few things broken on my 951 when I bought it was the cruise control lever. I imagine this is common as the thing is right at knee height.

The assembly that houses the lever is riveted so you have to purchase a whole new unit to fix any problems.

I picked up a used assembly on e-bay. After getting it installed, I was jazzed to have the cruise working. Turned onto another street and the turn signal just kept on blinking. I figured I had the collar on wrong, but that wasn't the case. The turn signal lever was just plain f'd up. Go figure.

Sure, I could have told the guy who sold it to me to take it back, wait a couple weeks and try again. But that's not me.

I drilled out the rivets on the 'new' unit. Of course, lifting of the plate was like taking apart a pocket watch. Springs and parts lept for freedom and scattered into various corners of the garage. I did managed to pry the cruise lever from the housing and keep all of its associated parts.

Now that I knew what to expect, I took my older (and in better condition) assembly and drilled out those rivets. It still fell apart when the springs came loose, but this time I managed to keep everything on the table.

I attached the new cruise lever and used screws/nuts to put the thing back together. Hopefully these will clear the collar when I reassemble.

I'll get some pictures up for you sickos who've always wanted to know what goes on inside your turn signal/cruise/wiper assembly.

 

hmm....make with the pics!

 

I also discovered what the inside of that 'watch' looks like. Its actually all pretty simple stuff, just so much of it.

 

Here's the story:

You can see all the contacts on the inside. The levers slide over these to activate the switches. There are detents which control the position of the switches. The turn signal switch on the used unit I had had the detent messed up. I tried lubricating it by spraying in some lubricant, but that made it worse. Probably because it broke down any grease that was left in there.

Also, all of the contacts are spring loaded, so prepare yourself. Most of the springs won't be found again until some future generation does an archealogical dig in m neighborhood.



The whole assembly is held together by rivets. I drilled those out to get inside. You can just about see the broken cruise control lever.



The signal arm is reset by a plastic reset mechinism held in position by two very tiny springs. The reset mechanism rides along a pocket on the signal arm. If your signal arm resets during one turn but not the other, it's probably missing one of the springs.



Installation is fairly straightforward. The only thing you need to make sure of is that the collar that resets the turn signal is set right. You need to turn it 4 1/4 turns from either full right or full left.



There's a screw that tightens the collar around the steering shaft. Put that screw in before you put the assembly back on the shaft. It's impossible to do otherwise (likewise, you don't need to remove it completely to take the assembly off the shaft).



The biggest thing here is making sure the wheel and the turn signal reset collar are in position correctly. Hopefully you marked the shaft and the steering wheel before removal. I did, but I was still off 1 or 2 tines after I put it all together. This means my left turn signal doesn't reset unless I turn just a little to the right.



So, some day if you're really bored, you now know you can take apart your turn signal/cruise/washer assembly and replace stuff.

 

Thanks for such an informative and well documented post. There never seems to be enough of these as our cars near 20 years old.