18 Jun
1998
18 Jun
'98
4:45 a.m.
Ooh! Not so fast! Is it straight, helical, worm or
hypoid? Or an
eliptical gear even? But yes, a gear is easy to rconstruct from its
wreckage.
Well, obviously one replaces with the correct type of gear!
Some cams and levers, though, have quite tight
tolerance
spikes and notches which it is quite difficult to get right from seeing
the bent/broken ones.
Impossible, sometimes. What if a special "hump" on a cam is so worn down
that one cannot reconstruct its shape? Some of the correct "shape" could
exist as aluminum powder.
Bearing in mind Tony's, Sam's and others'
comments on intermittent
faults and the like, yes, up to a point. Video is not the only
exception, though - other things (e.g. disk drives) can suffer
similarly.
No, not disk drives. Sure, some analog circuitry in a drive might go sour,
but those faults would result in bad data. With a working drive, you want
correct data, and if you do not get it, something is wrong. There is no
tolerance. With an analog system, you have to expect that the output data
will not be perfect. For example (also a magnetic recording medium),
playing back a signal will never be the same as what was recorded, due to
noise and distortion.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net