Grease recommendations for worm gear?

[John Garza (3665)]

Roland, I'd say definitely lube the worm gear. As I wrote earlier, it's mechanical blockage keeping the wheel from spinning unimpeded, lack of lubrication, or the clutch. If you have no lube, that's the most likely problem. And I've never lubed the motor internals, you don't need to do that. I was lucky to notice the same Swiss made motors (with worm gears!) sold by Edmund Scientific many years ago - so I picked up a box of them JIC. But I never needed to replace a motor.

Tony, I didn't think about the tantalums. That's a good idea. I've replaced them on others, but they always failed consistently - not intermittently and in a pattern. But I can say after a 100 cards or so, it's getting more reliable. I will only occasionally get a misread on the first pass, and zero on the second. Maybe the grease is getting 'smoothed out', maybe the caps are getting reformed, not sure at this point.

On tantalums, I've never seen any explode on calcs. But they do on power supply lines for the vintage S100 systems I have. Much more current flows through them than on a calculator. Powering up unused equipment with a variac will reduce such surprises. As a rule, on the S100 systems I keep operational, I recap all the cards. Ceramics I keep, but tantalums and electrolytics are replaced without testing - I assume they are bad or will be shortly. Cheap insurance!