Sunday, April 19, 2009

Removing lint from 2.5mm jack - unjamming microswitch

My (awesome!) phone is "naked" in my pocket all the time so lint, & gunk get into the 2.5mm headset / audio jack at the bottom:



And the microswitch inside would occasionally jam, so that the phone would never come out of "headset mode," even after the jack is removed. One day last year it just would not come out of "headset" mode at all. So for several months I have been walking around with a bluetooth headset all the time because the phone could not function without a bluetooth headset or a wired headset. It was very inconvenient. Finally, today, I started searching for a way to unjam the microswitch and found it here. live.com search is awesome! To unjam a 2.5mm jack microswitch:

  • Start playing a music file or anything that should go through the main speaker
  • Make sure it is playing by attaching headphones to the jack, then remove the jack.
  • Soak a Q-tip in WD-40 and twist the cotton end into a tiny corscrew that fits in a 2.5mm hole.
  • Twist the WD-40 soaked cotton into the 2.5mm hole and twist for three minutes.
  • Put the headset in to make sure music is still playing
  • Repeat if necessary

It works!

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