Weather Station Maintance

Just discovered the rain gauge on my Vantage Pro 2+ had stopped working.
Nothing new about that. Usually a couple of times a year I have to clean bird poop out of the funnel, but that was not the problem this time.
The little reed switch had died, just like the one in the wind speed has done a few times.
I had a few spare reeds laying around I bought off ebay from when I repaired the wind speed instrument.

I removed the entire ISS from it;s mount and went about dismantling it. The tipping buckets unclip and come out fairly easy. Only problem is the cable gets caught up on everything between the base and top of radiation shield. So I removed the screws and dropped off the shield.
I was surprised to see just how much dust was inside the shield. I would never have expected it to be that dirty considering it is not fan aspirated.

Anyway I cleaned it up and soldered in a new reed and put it all back together. But it DID NOT WORK. The reed is N.O., but once the tipping buckets are installed the reed stayed closed. It seems these cheap Chinese reeds are to sensitive. Next day I went and bought a few from a local electronics shop and installed a new one. That fixed it. Now it works like a bought one.

and they are easily broken too