I bought one of these well over 30 years ago. http://www.autoartisans.com/armatron/SuperArmatron.jpg My sons played with it until either they were bored or it stopped working. It went back in the box and they never told me the motor no longer ran. I ended up taking it apart and disassembling the small 3V DC motor. Bend clips back, pull off plastic brush assembly. Black greasy gunk all over the armature and brushes. Once cleaned up and put back together the motor ran but two of the joints were problematic. I really didn't want to take apart the arm but I could see a shaft turning but the gear not. When I did it burst apart and gears and gears mounted on shafts were everywhere. Took a while to figure it out what went where. Now I've used the Dremel to carve some grooves into the shafts and small vise on mill to drill 1.15mm holes into the body of the nylon gears which, I'm guessing due to age, had cracked. Almost looks like the gears were molded onto the shafts but no splines. http://www.autoartisans.com/armatron/ArmDisassembled.jpg Anyway, a bit of 60 minute epoxy and now I'll have to wait 12 hours for it to set good and hard and then the adventure of trying to put it all back together. I know where it all goes now. All mechanical, one motor turns continuously, the joysticks engage six different gears to create the joint motion. The complexity reminds me of IBM Selectric typewriters I repaired as an IBM OPCE so many decades ago. Now it's all done with computers. I'm not sure there are even people around who could design something like this that is fully mechanical. John Dammeyer
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