Watesta Counter ?

[dragonser]

Hi,
while looking through some items I got many years ago, I found the following counter.
Does anyone know anything about Watesta Electronics from Loughton Essex ?
Luckily I bought a matching mains plug from either RS or Farnell probably 15 years ago..

[CambridgeWorks]

Don't recognise it, nor the makers name. Plug looks like an old Belling Lee. Counters of that style were produced by several firms in the 70s and early 80s. RCS Electronics is one type that I bought. Back then, more than a week's wages I think! But a good product.
Rob

[ronbryan]

This is what I recall about Watesta counters when I worked for Vactric Control Equipment in Morden, Surrey in the 1970s. I did not work for the section that used the counters, but was aware of batches coming in to the lab. I did see one example that had all of the large red CCL pcb mounted smoothing electrolytics leaning over drunkenly. It turned out that they had been inserted the wrong way round, rather than having an incorrect ripple-current rating.

Watesta made counters for a division of Joseph Lucas called Rotax, who had taken over Vactric, as part of a system Rotax had devised for digitising a machine tool. A Rotax precision ball screw (an expensive threaded rod with a ball bearing 'nut') would be fitted in parallel with (or instead of?) the machine's lead screw and was used to drive an incremental Rotax-Baldwin optical shaft encoder with quadrature tracks (for direction sensing) as the slide rest was traversed.

The Watesta counter would count the pulses from the encoder and display them on nixie tubes. The front panel decade switches were used to pre-set a number on the display when a button was pressed, and the display would then count down to zero as the machine's tool holder was advanced.

Ron

[dragonser]

Hi,
this is all very useful as to how the counter works, thank you !