I've now added a neutral wire to seven BSR brand 1980s era WS467 switches. They're much thicker than newer switches and are held closed with rivets. The modded switches have no problem with the Philips bulbs but the ones made in 1980 show a bit of spiking in the sine waves and very occasional flicker with GE bulbs that haven't had problems in any of the other switches. Go figure.
Switches made in 1980 have a round green sticker that starts with 0, while 1984 switches have a round white sticker that starts with 4.
Here are the steps:
With a new 1/8" titanium-coated drill bit, drill in the center of the rivet on the front of the switch. Push with gradually-increasing pressure till drill bit starts to carve out a thin strip of metal. If you push too hard and it will bite too deep and start spinning the rivet instead of cutting. When it works correctly, you should feel a slight change as the ring-shaped rivet head snaps off and starts to pull away from the switch.
The rivet is brass colored inside but if you see silver, you're drilling into the aluminum frame of the switch, so stop.
If the rivet head ring doesn't break off from drilling (which happened about half the time before I switched to the new titanium bit which drilled 8 in a row with no problem), gently hammer a small chisel under the ring to break it off. Once it starts to break, to limit nicking the switch faceplate, you can pull it off with a pliers. You might even get a grip on it with pliers without chiseling - start with whatever side the drill made thinnest. Bend any parts that don't break off inward so they'll slip through the hole.
Once rivet head is removed, push rivet body out of switch with needle-nose pliers enough to grasp its other end with pliers and pull out completely.
Switches made in 1980 look like this:
There is a small hole in the circuit board where I added the darker blue wire nearest the camera goes through. That new wire is 18awg and will serve as the load wire. To make room for it to slip through, I had to enlarge the existing hole with a 7/64" drill bit. I did it by hand using the drill bit in a tap wrench and twisting back and forth to make sure I didn't damage components below the PCB, but a very slow electric drill used with gentle pressure would probably also work. Either way, use low pressure near the end or the bit will to break through the PCB surface suddenly and slam into the other PCB or scratch a component.
Strip 1/4" insulation from the blue wire, then put the stripped end in the new hole and use a pliers to pull it between the sky-blue resistor and the red choke as you see in the picture.
In the 1984 board, there is already a hole near the 330k resistor that is large enough to fit the darker blue wire:
On either board, use a desoldering braid to remove most of the solder from where the choke wire is soldered in near the corner of the PCB. Grip the choke wire with pliers near where it enters the coil, then twist clockwise as you heat the hole it's in to pull it out. Once out, use a pliers to twist stripped blue wire with choke wire as in the pictures.
Solder choke and blue wire together, then add heat-shrink tube over soldered wires.
Near an edge of the PCB, find the 330k resistor which is a brown cylinder with a silver, yellow, and two orange bands. Wedge something under the side of the resistor that's nearest the choke. Heat solder holding the wire on that side of the resistor and pry it out of the PCB. Straighten the wire, then bend a small hook in the end of it.
Strip a bit over 1/8" of insulation from the end of new 24awg stranded wire (I used a yellow wire in the pictures), make a hook, then crimp the hook to the hook in the 330k resistor. Solder together. You can optionally add heat shrink over the soldered wires but I didn't feel they were near enough anything to bother. Don't cover any part of the resistor with heat shrink because it needs to dissipate heat.
Thread the 24awg wire over to the hole where choke wire was removed from. In the 1980 board, don't confuse the choke wire hole with an adjacent larger hole that is ringed with solder and I guess acts as a test pad. Make sure the new 24awg wire fits completely inside the case and won't be crimped when the case is closed (also push the two PCBs together and look for places that might pinch the new wire), then cut to length, strip 1/8", stick stripped wires up through PCB hole so wires protrude a bit above the hole, then cover with a mound of solder, being careful not to push the wires down as you work.
Completed wiring in 1984 switch:
I picked up metric M3 nuts and bolts at the local hardware store to replace the rivets. The nuts fit exactly in the depressions in the body of the switch. Although the bolts are thinner than the rivets, it doesn't matter because the plastic parts are keyed to each other. Result:
It's blurry, but the original lighter blue wire is wrapped in white electrical tape to identify it as neutral.
I use a cut and stripped extension cord with Wago 221-415 lever nuts for testing. They're expensive, but so quick and easy to connect and disconnect and hold securely - just flip one of those orange levers up, slide wire in with no resistance, then flip lever down. I've started using them in all my DIY electrical work instead of wire nuts.
Connect all 3 white neutral wires together.
Connect black (hot) from the wall to black in the switch.
Connect blue from the switch to black leading to the lamp.
Plug a lamp in to the end of the extension.
Green ground wire is floating here and not attached to anything since the lamp plug is two-prong.
I plug the whole thing into a power bar so I can easily flip power on/off while I set up the connections.
I let each switch run two LEDs (total 26W) for at least an hour and watched them with a FLIROne IR camera to see that nothing overheated. They all got hottest near the center of the PCB and in the 330k resistor but never above 90F. I checked the 1988, 1994, and 2009 switches the same way. I also ran them all at least an hour with the case closed and saw no significant heat buildup.
Finally, the neutral mod actually fixed one of the switches. Two of the 1980 switches I pulled would not light any kind of bulb I tried them with for more than a second, even an incandescent. One of them would not respond to X10 commands. I used one of them as my test subject when testing the modification and was surprised to find it started working normally after adding the neutral wire. So I tried modifying the second one (the one that didn't respond to X10) but sadly it remained broken after modification.
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