Coming up dry for Alps/Radio Shack/Atari/Commodore plotter gears - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

22 Apr 2003

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 To: cctalk(a)classiccmp.org

On Tue, 22 Apr 2003, Ethan Dicks wrote:

  That sounds interesting for a large enough gear,
but in this case, it's
 about 1/8" in diameter and 5/32" long with a bore of 1/20".

 I don't think I'll be trying to whack and/or notch a chunk of plastic
 that's smaller than a tic-tac. 
What type of plastic were these gears made from? I was thinking about
pulling out one of my plotters, but I don't exactly remember where I put
it right now ;P

If they are made of nylon, I'm surprised that they split. I really expect
to find that they were made of some kind of ABS or ABS blended plastic
that didn't handle the press-fit pressure very well.

Has anyone contacted Alps to see if maybe they might know where the gears
were made originally? It's certainly possible a set of molds might still
be sitting around somewhere...

-Toth

Hi
 I've seen this same kind of failure in a small Automatic Kodak
camera.
 One other thought would be to make a mold with a good
gear and use that to make new gears using something like
JB Weld ( I do like this stuff ). You'd mold the gear on
the shaft so that there would be no tendency to split the
gear from pressing it together.
 The gear in the camera looked like it was a nylon gear and
not the typical plastic. I didn't make a check on it though.
Dwight