atari printers - gears - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

12 Jun 2006

Tony Duell wrote:

...
 Message: 33
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 22:24:50 +0100 (BST)
From: ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell)
Subject: Re: atari printers - gears
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Message-ID: <m1FpXQX-000IxxC at p850ug1>
Content-Type: text/plain 
...
 >
>On 6/11/06, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
> > You can just throw your bad one away and get a new one.  There's a guy
> > selling 825 printers for $10 the each, NOS on Yahoo!:
>
>That's one of the reasons I bought a handful of printer mechs from
>Alltronics or Electronic Goldmine or one of those guys... spare gears.
>  The problem is that what I got was about 90% defective. 
...
 That was my first thought. These gears don't fail
because they wear out in 
use, they fail due to stresses generated by them being pushed onto the 
speindle. Severaal of mine have failed without being used.

Personally, I'd want to use a metal gear that was a sliding fit onto the 
motor sprindle, and then fix it on with a suitable Loctite.

Somebody else suggested replacing all 3 gears in each train. Difficult. The 
last gear is part of the platten or cable drum, and is, in fact 2 gears wit 
han anti-backlash spring IIRC. All these parts could be made, but you're 
not going to find them off-the-shelf. And if you're going to start 'm,king 
swarf'[1], why not just make the pinion you need.

[1] A common UK expresion for doing home machining, for the obvious reason. 

...
 -tony 

This topic came up several years ago. At that time, I emailed Tony about a 
shop in Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, that makes gears for model 
railroad locomotives (I recently emailed Ethan offlist with the same 
information). I don't recall if Tony ever checked them out. I'd contact them 
myself, but I don't have an Atari printers to measure the gear.

Anyway, for the information of the whole list, they are:

    Gear Services (Letchworth) Ltd.,
    The Wynd East,
    The Wynd,
    Letchworth Garden City,
    Hertfordshire,
    SG6 3EL
    United Kingdom.

    Tel: +44 (0) 1462 685327
    Fax: +44 (0) 1462 677821

Their Web site is http://www.ultrascale.co.uk/ggs0001.php.

They can produce the following spur gears:

48 DP from 12 teeth upwards
60 DP from 12 teeth upwards
64 DP from 13 teeth upwards
72 DP from 13 teeth upwards
96 DP from 18 teeth upwards
100 DP from 15 teeth upwards
0.4 MOD. from 21 teeth upwards
0.5 MOD. from 15 teeth upwards

The price for a small gear (e.g., 15 tooth 100DP) is /Pounds 1.11, so it 
should not be outrageous to have a custom gear made.

Bob