On Thu, Feb 16, 2017 at 1:59 PM, Paul Koning <paulkon...@comcast.net> wrote: > > The LA36 was an excellent machine. Unlike the LA30, with its atrocious > keyboard > and a print mechanism that jammed about every 20th carriage return.
I have to disagree with that. The LA36 is horrible. There is a major design misfeature. There is no separate home sensor. Instead the carriage is run into the left end-stop, the motor stalls, and the logic detects this by a lack of pulses from the rotary encoder on the motor spindle. Now, if the (weak, plastic) key in the carriage belt sprocket breaks, the motor doesn't stall. It keeps turning, slowly, with the spindle slipping in the sprocket. The logic sees encoder pulses and keeps it turning. But the load is excessive for the motor, which generally gets hot enough to burn the enamel off the windings. Do NOT ask how I found this out. Suffice it to say a friend and I had to rewind the motor in an LA36 at the university we were studying at. -tony
