[ARC5] A really WEIRD question...

[Dennis Monticelli]

Ken,

Those balls are indeed very small.  An ARC-5 transmitter I got off ebay had
been poorly packed and the box had obviously received some good whacks.
 Well, when I opened the box I found a broken ceramic support for the coil
and the variable cap did not turn properly.  It was then that I discovered
there were missing ball bearings.  Luckily I had kept the shipping box and
a thorough search turned up all the missing balls save for one.  Getting
them in was a real pain, but in the end I had a decent var cap again.

Dennis AE6C


On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 7:38 PM, Kenneth G. Gordon <kgordon2006 at frontier.com
> wrote:

> On 30 May 2013 at 15:46, J. Forster wrote:
>
> > I don't know specifically, but if there was no ball separator to space
> > out the balls, I'd pretty much put in as many as will fit, then remove
> > one, and rotate the shaft end to end to spread out the remaining ones.
>
> Well, that is kinda what I ended up doing.
>
> It turns out that not only did he lose all the balls at the tensioner end,
> but he
> lost all of the balls around the driven end also.
>
> There were at least 24 balls in that end, and I got 10 in the other end.
>
> I took a totally ruined capacitor apart, then spent the better part of two
> hours
> putting as many of those balls back in the main races as I could keep from
> losing on the floor.
>
> Those things are about 1/2 the size of a pin-head, by the way.
>
> I managed to get something like 18 balls in the big end, and once I put
> everything back together, it works very smoothly now.
>
> However, it is a giganitc PITA putting those things back in. I sure hope I
> never have to do it again.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ken W7EKB
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