plastics...

This is more of a "general purpose/non-vector" message in case anyone's
interested...

A lot of older games seem to use plastic parts in the controllers that wear
against other plastic and leave nice little piles of plastic-dust as the
controller slowly destroys itself...

Our manufacturing-test guy was just showing off some of our new production
modem test machines and he pointed out what the "test plugs" are made of.
It's a plastic called "Delrin". Apparently it's a self-lubricating plastic
that's extremely wear-resistant and tough (9000psi shear strength). It's
cool looking too. Shiny and black. :-) I see that they make sliding-door
rollers out of it.

Anyway, I remembered that RickS had some replacement trakball shafts milled
a while back which got me thinking... I don't know off the top of my head
which parts are the most wear-prone, but this Delrin stuff would be pretty
cool to make replacement joystick/whirly-gig parts out of-- if anyone has
AutoCAD 14 and free/cheap access to a good CAM machine. ;-)

(Hmmmm, that I,Robot hall-effect stick would be a good starting point... ;-)

FYI...

-Clay

P.S. I'll be out on vacation for most of the rest of the year, so e-mail
contact might be pretty spotty. Hope everyone has a happy holiday!

Clayton N. Cowgill Engineering Manager
_______________________________________________________________________
/\ Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. clay@supra.com
\/ Communications Division http://www.supra.com/
Received on Fri Dec 19 14:25:35 1997