Awhike back I commented on the poor quality and failure rate of deck
switches supplied with Lewmar windlasses. The wire potted into the
switches is small guage and non-tinned. It rapidly corrodes and in no
time all you have is red powder and a windlass that won't work. You can
replace some of the wire with good stuff but since it's potted into the
switch itself you eventually run out of wire to replace and have no way
to connect the switch.

On deck, the switch looks really big, about two inches in diamter with
a hard cover and wires coming out the bottom. But if you take it apart,
you find the switch itself is a tiny microswitch actuated by a plastic
disk that sits on top of it and is in turn covered by a flexible
plastic diaphragm. Lewmar charges sixty dollars or so for the complete
assembly.

Radio Shack sells an almost identical microswitch for about $2. It fits
exactly even to the retainer pins. Wiring is not potted. The switch has
solder lugs sticking out of the bottom to which you may solder top
quality wire. Were I to do this again, I would open up the switches
that came with the windlass and replace the microswitches and wiring on
the original installtion.