"DoN. Nichols" wrote:

On 2012-02-24, Michael A. Terrell wrote:

[ ... ]

Only you could decide if it was worth it, but I would think they
would be a lot of similar gears that would use the same tooling. They
built whiole series of equipment on similar chassis, after all. You
could look at some of the manuals on the Agilent website to get an idea
what they look like, if you're really interested. Agileent is the name
of the former HP test equipment division, for those who don't know. The
site is broken into chemical and test equipment.

Coming back to answer one other part after sending off the main
answer.

I remember at least one product which I could not make the
mechanical parts for with my current equipment. This was an audio
oscillator -- little modular one, not to be confused with the old
tube-driven ones which took up four times the volume. The dial was
coupled to a pot by a pair of spirals with dial cord wrapped around and
under tension in both directions, so you got a linear scale on the
frequency. dial


They use DDS these days. You program the frequency, wave shape &
output level into a tiny IC. Analog Devices make several of the DDS
ICs. You can buy a complete demo board on Ebay for under $10, and drive
it from the parallel port on a Windows computer with a couple 74HCT574
ICs.

Wavetek was really bad for mechanical designs, and always had too
much backlash for the work I did. I had the HP 3325B digital function
generator, while everyone else in test had Waveteks.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense.