17 Jun
1998
17 Jun
'98
4:22 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
Yes, and you know the diameter (since you have the stripped one) and the
tooth pitch (from whatever it meshes with. So you can either work out the
number of teeth, or maybe even see the remains of the teeth on the
stripped one.
After that, all you need is a milling machine and a dividing head. Not
that imposible to get (a lot easier than an IC fab line).
Of course, manufacturing parts for mechanical computers is now made
so much easier with silicon-driven machine tools. We now have the
technology to _really_ build an Analytical Engine, one that would
perform as Babbage hoped. Not as fast as (say) an HP-65, but it
would work.
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_
The other
nice thing is that, with the possible exception of custom cams,
it's generally pretty obvious what broken parts should be like. And then
it's possible to make them without too much equipment. But a dead custom
chip is almost impossible to figure out, and hard to reproduce.
That is very true - a stripped gear is a stripped gear is a stripped gear!