Mysterious Screw

[hillale]

1625 has used leadscrews very successfully in the past. In 2006 it was used to actuate the hood on our turreted shooter and in 2008 it was used to bring our shooter from pick-up to shooting position.

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Al Skierkiewicz

Large versions of this little screw are used to adjust position on satellite dishes all over the world. I work with one dish that has a lead screw for elevation and it is connected to a 3/4 HP motor with an electric brake. The screw is about 4' long and at least 2" in diameter. Another dish that is much larger has two, one for azimuth and one for elevation. Both can be operated by a hand crank or electric drill attachment. The dish is 6 meters in diameter.

The dishes I worked on way back when used gear drive...10 meters with a pretty heavy equipment room attached to the az drive....

If you ever get the chance to peer into the workings of a 1957-59 Ford Retractable car, you can see several lead screws. An engineering marvel.

[Brian C]

6 motors too

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Jim,
Our old 10 meter C band dish had manual adjustments for azimuth but luckily was a polar mount. As I remember, the lead screw transmission had another right angle gear reduction box on it. It moved exceedingly slow. We only had to aim once when the main PBS satellite reached end of life and we had to reposition.

[MrForbes]

I guess that X band stuff was more finicky about where you point the antenna...or it was just that some of the birds were about out of gas and moved around a lot..but our tracking systems ran full time

[IndySam]

Originally Posted by Taylor

From what I hear, on team 829 the Head Time-Waster becomes the Lead Button-Maker.

Because after a day of cutting out circles with scissors your hands are so cramped up you cant operate the lead screw anymore.